Reading Dostoyevsky For Kicks and Giggles

Every few days I read a bit of Augustine; he is magnificent reading, but difficult, irregular, and strange.

I read Augustine in the middle of the day, in snatches.

Even in his word choice I can feel the chaos and confusion of his age. In the irregularity of subject and the novelty of the autobiographical voice, we see for the first time what I call the Christian difference. Before Augustine the chief figure of the age were nobles. Augustine was a common school teacher, and a bishop. After Christ, it is the common folk who make history.

But the palpable darkness of Augustine frightens to me. His profound seriousness is the only relief from human nature. His century is a frightening place.

In comparison to Augustine, Dostoyevsky is a blaze of light.

Before I sleep I read as much Dostoyevsky as I can. Before sleep is best - his work is liminal - that is, on the edge of unconsciousness. Reading him when you first wake up or after meditating seems altogether too cheerful to me, but in the dark hours Dostoyevsky shines.

I'm reading Demons; the new Penguin translation is flat out fine work. Translator was Robert A Maguire. I love how well Penguin has translated his work. Maybe the choppy rough Russian just moves better into modern English than the French? I don't know.

Demons is confusing and superb. First I had trouble with the names, and had to bookmark the cast of characters list at the end of the text and refer to it constantly (I still do a bit). Second I had to deal with the allusive and hysterical way characters have of delivering major plot points. My thinking goes something like this:

"So... Stephan Verkovensky is maybe betrothed to some nobody called Sonya or Dunya who is the protege of his patron Vavarya Stravogina, for manifold deeply suspicous and impure reasons other. But Vavarya's maybe looney son, is returning home soon, bringing along with him Stephan's son who is an unknown and sundry complications. And Kirilov thinks everyone should commit suicide to prove there is no God. And Liputin is a vile gossip who seems to know everything and say nothing. And there is a new governor in town whose wife doesn't like Vavarya Starvogina. And everyone speaks French when they're excited, which is all the time, which is tiresome to deciper into English but simpler than having to stop to look it up in the stupid notes at the end of the Penguin Book because you know what it means anyhow if you stop reading for a minute and dig out the French vocab but that means you have to stop reading to translate French."

Jeebus himself couldn't sort out this kind of absurd mess, but it sort of makes sense, if you ignore the many maybes in the plot. Reading a summary online would take away the surprise and leave the hysterics.

At 17 years of age, when I last read Demons, I doubt I understood it anyhow.

Do you know why I find him funny? Because I really enjoy Dostoyevsky's company. I really like Fyodor Mikhaylovich the man. I empathize with him. I feel his wild humor. I see how he sees the Russian people. Dostoyevsky cannot see the future, the Bolsheviks and the present Russian Mafia kleptocracy. Instead he sees the foolishness genius and passionately misplaced devotion of the Russian intelligentsia to French frivolity and sentimental vacuity a la Russe. He sees it clearly, and sees it fully, accepts it all in himself, and he laughs.

Do I love Dostoyevsky most of all because he laughs at himself? I don't mean him to reduce him to a character out of Gogol. He is much more than anything Gogol could invent.

Hm. Please allow me to help non-Dostoyevsky readers understand what kind of experience they are missing out on:

Reading Dostoyevsky is like being trapped in a big hessian sack with twenty-seven affectionate lapdogs: it's unpleasant at the time but when its over you secretly enjoyed it so much. All those flickering pink tongues. Mmm.

Augustine's Four Rules of Reading A Book

Today I learnt how Augustine read.

His style of reading reminds me of Dante's letter to his patron Can Grande - no doubt Dante learnt to read through Augustine. But what I was unprepared for was how very wide the gap between Augustine's view of reading and the modern view.

Augustine's rules for reading are (to me at least) still relevant. They are four, and I state them as principles rather than practices because of their general usefulness:

1. PURITY - reading that subserves cravings and appetites distorts the mind's ability to read the text. Maybe a text serves the lower appetites; nevertheless, the meaning of it can only be got at with a mind free of bias and a pure appetite to understand.

2. FAITH - You must suspend disbelief, but you must not suspend belief, in reading. That is to say, faith must be present in reading, and cynicism must be suspending in reading, for comprehension to occur.

I would add that faith can be conditional on historical context or limited to the space of the reading of the text, but it must be present according to Augustine in order to read well.

Faith in the text is primary in making sense of it. Why? Because reading is an inclination of the will and appetite towards clarity and freedom, therefore right from the start the will must be freed from doubt, the enemy of good faith.

These two rules for reading, purity and faith, pertain to the appetites and the will. Purity of appetites and a faithful will are the ends of their application.

3. LOVE - I read Harold Bloom's criticism from love of his mind. Why do I love Bloom's work? Because he has taught me that only by love can I win access through the text to another person's consciousness. For me, as for Bloom, Augustine and Dante, love is the only entree into the mind of greatness. A strong love will take you to the heart of any text.

Simply put, love makes reading and writing worth while. Since reading involves the love of that which reads - in other words, reading is intellectual vanity - the most literate books win the greatest love, since they most intimately put us in contact with that quality of intellectual vanity which does reading. Even more deeply, the love that creates a text and the love that reads the text are the one substance, and the love that carefully appreciates a text arises from the same kind of love as that which created the text. Love is the common human factor in reading and writing.

Criticism without love is worthless. A critic without love, even in the form of courtesy, respect, or polite restraint from abuse, is not worth a hearing. Any misreading (in the sense of Harold Bloom's map of misreadings) that adds love to the text is good or at least harmless.

4. MULTIPLICITY - Simple, clear passages of a text offer a meaning which is unarguably revealed by purity, faith and love. The consensus of informed opinions around a great text is fairly fixed, and there is little freedom in it. But Augustine offers a view of free interpretation of the text in the case of ambiguous passages.

Multiple readings, imagined, invented and supposed, are good and useful when the text is ambiguous and poetic, and when they do not violate the good faith of the text. Obscure passages provide freedom to play and explore the text more fully.

These are Augustine's four rules for reading a book, then. Let's put them in their historical and intellectual context now!

Augustine came to value the pagan tradition negatively, as an example of ignorance and error in human thinking. So much of his rules for reading concern the Christian and Jewish religious writings of his time, many of which came to be our present day bible. Augustine's reading was informed by a deep seriousness or purpose, and a moral and devotional aim.

Perhaps the primary challenge to we moderns is Augustine's stark vision of the human good to be got from reading. But Augustine differs not greatly in this from Samuel Johnson, who read voraciously and judged by very high standards of moral purity.

I suppose the biggest difference from we moderns is the more broad sense of what is proper in books - we are less offended and less corrupted, I suppose, by impure and appetite-stimulating images or words. Perhaps it is because we are so constantly overfull with stimuli, that we end up becoming accustomed or unaffected to the tides of vicious and sex-loaded content or screens and pages wash up. Certainly we seem to inhabit an alien and noisy world compared to the agrarian north African environment of Augustine.

Take these rules, then, as you will... a stimulus to your reading more spiritedly, or a window on a kind of reading past and long gone.

Saint Augustine on Sex and Body Image

Augustine is authoritative on body image and sex issues. He ought to have his own column.

Here's my rendering of his key idea from out of fusty antique English:

"So there's no need to insult God in our addictions and errors by blaming the body, because the body is good in its own kind and in its own degree. Being human means accepting both body AND soul on their own different spiritual terms.

"A man who goes on about the soul as if it were the highest value, and condemns the body as if it were evil, I assure you is trapped in his body by his love of his soul as much as by his hatred of his body."

Saint Augustine's striking recovery from sex addiction has a lot to teach us all.

It seems that sex addicts like Saint Augustine only recover when they accept the body on its own terms of what is good, and appreciate the body as good in its own degree and kind. Sex addiction seems not addiction to sexual pleasure, but addiction to conflict in regards to sexual pleasure.

Similarly we could usefully describe eating disorders as an addiction to the body expressed as hatred, or perhaps the false expectation that the body to provide the quality and kind of satisfactions that can only be derived from the living soul.

Augustine's quote above strikes to the heart of the nature of the imbalance between soul and body, and the lopsided otherworldly view of spirituality which denigrates the body, and seems to me to call for discernment in relation to body image issues.