Brothers and Sisters

I think siblings are very important. I really feel badly for only children. I know some people think it's better because they get all their parents' attention and they didn't have to share a room and all these things, but I think about who in my family is really going to be around when I'm reaching the end of life, and it'll be my brother and my sisters and their families. So I'm grateful for them and excited for the next time I'll see them.

I'm saying this because I am reading The Brothers Karamazov, a Russian classic by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It's very dense and very long, and fortunately I'm reading it with a friend from work so I'm accountable for keeping up with it. I'm still in the first hundred pages, but so far the Karamazov family seems very dyfunctional to me. The patriarch, Fyodor, is loud and obnoxious and totally inept at caring for his sons. Their mothers (there were two) are dead, and the boys have all come back home for various reasons. At this point, Dostoevsky has given a lot of back story and described a meeting of the brothers, their father, several assorted friends and relatives, and Father Zossima, a priest who mentors the youngest brother, Alyosha. I can't decide yet if Dostoevsky intends to use each of his characters as mouthpieces for various parts of his own views, or if the philosophical speeches that keep coming out of them will be a character development device instead. Right now I find them a little aggravating because I can't quite fit the pieces together well enough to see how their discourses matter to the story. I'm still in the first part, though, and Dostoevsky himself says in the introduction that the first part is meant to be just a prelude to the second and third parts, which are the real story. So we'll see.

Despite the pomposity of these speeches, I've come across a couple of intriguing nuggets. Father Zossima appears on the portico outside the monastery to heal peasant women who come from all over to be blessed and prayed over. Many of them come seemingly under possession, and when he blesses them they become sane. The author comments of the sick woman that "the women who supported her and the invalid herself fully believed as a truth beyond question that the evil spirit in possession of her could not hold out if the sick woman were brought to the sacrament and made to bow down before it ... aroused by the expectation of the miracle of healing and the implicit belief that it would come to pass; it did come to pass, though only for a moment." This idea of what we believe coming true simply by the strength of our belief is compelling to me, and I think it supports the notion that people will bend evidence to fit their own paradigm. Since this appears so early in the book and has no apparent narrative significance, I think it's a theme that will be fleshed out later on.

Another theme I see is the question of what real love actually is. Zossima says in response to one woman, "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all ... But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science." So it will be interesting to see which characters believe in which version of love and what the consequences are. Stay tuned ...

Song In My Head: "From The Inside Out" - Hillsong - digging this one right now.