Silence

By Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840).
From Wikimedia Commons.

If, in observing the present state of the world and life in general, from a Christian point of view one had to say (and from a Christian point of view with complete justification): It is a disease. And if I were a physician and someone asked me "What do you think should be done?" I would answer, "The first thing, the unconditional condition for anything to be done, consequently the very first thing that must be done is: create silence, bring about silence; God’s Word cannot be heard, and if in order to be heard in the hullabaloo it must be shouted deafeningly with noisy instruments, then it is not God’s Word; create silence! Ah, everything is noisy; and just as a strong drink is said to stir the blood, so everything in our day, even the most insignificant project, even the most empty communication, is designed merely to jolt the senses or to stir up the masses, the crowd, the public, noise! And man, this clever fellow, seems to have become sleepless in order to invent ever new instruments to increase noise, to spread noise and insignificance with the greatest possible haste and on the greatest possible scale. Yes, everything is soon turned upside down: communication is indeed soon brought to its lowest point with regard to meaning, and simultaneously the means of communication are indeed brought to their highest with regard to speedy and overall circulation; for what is publicized with such hot haste and, on the other hand, what has greater circulation than-rubbish! Oh, create silence!" 

 ~ Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, I, 47-48.

A Dostoevskyan Maelstrom

The Double (1846), White Nights (1848), Notes from Underground (1864), The Meek One (1876), and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877). These are the five stories contained in this nice collection. They are some of the shorter works the brilliant Russian writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–1881). They are phenomenally written stories of alienation from self, others, and God through pride, oversize shame, narcissism, disordered self-consciousness, and utopian ideas. This edition also contains a helpful introduction and handy endnotes aimed at guiding the reader through Dostoevsky's many literary, philosophical, social, and political references.

The Double is the story of a man crippled with shame, and his unrealistic attempts to idealize his own self only make things worse, to the point of driving him to complete alienation and, ultimately, to madness.

In White Nights, an isolated man begins to fall in love with an equally emotionally fragile young woman. A love story with an announced tragic end, since the young woman is already unofficially promised to someone else. Differently from the antiheroes of The Double, Notes from Underground, and The Meek One, White Nights' antiheroes, the White Nights' protagonist does not willfully inflict pain and shame over his loved one. His detachment from reality and mankind, however, ends up hurting both of them.

Notes from Underground is the imaginary diary of a man so clueless of and adverse of the true nature of love and companionship that he cannot even simply conceive them as being nothing but domination and humiliation of the other. In fact, every attempt that he makes to establish a relationship ends either in his own or others' humiliation, or both.

The Meek One is the story of a pawnbroker who believes that, in order to love someone, the other must be forcibly shaped according to his own preconceived and ill-conceived image. He is the kind of person that "is sometimes perfectly ready to plunge the soul they say they love in endless misery if only they can still in some fashion possess it" (C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 115; see, as a contrast, The Four Loves, 62). As he marries a woman much younger than him, he realizes his foolishness only when it is too late.

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man tells the story of an atheist and relativist who (coherently to his worldview) believes that nothing at all matters. Thus, he decides to take his own life. However, a fantastic dream leads him to a radical conversion and change of perspective.

Together, these stories are a slow and inexorable psychological and spiritual maelstrom into some of the most intricate labyrinths of the misery of mankind. These works tell us of some of the direst consequences of mankind's fallen state. Although the narrations are focused on specific individuals, references to mankind in general are also present. Perhaps the following passage from the last chapter of The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (pp. 380-381) offers the overarching metaphysical setting and general interpretative key of all the stories by Dostoevsky mentioned here. Perhaps, without its context, this passage is not fully comprehensible. Perhaps I have not said enough to favor a full comprehension. Well, these are two more reasons for reading them by yourself.

Then science appeared. As they became wicked they began talking of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those ideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice and drew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and to ensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardly remembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe that they had ever been happy and innocent. They even laughed at the possibility o this happiness in the past, and called it a dream. They could not even imagine it in definite form and shape, but, strange and wonderful to relate, though they lost all faith in their past happiness and called it a legend, they so longed to be happy and innocent once more that they succumbed to this desire like children, made an idol of it, set up temples and worshipped their own idea, their own desire; though at the same time they fully believed that it was unattainable and could not be realised, yet they bowed down to it and adored it with tears! Nevertheless, if it could have happened that they had returned to the innocent and happy condition which they had lost, and if someone had shown it to them again and had asked them whether they wanted to go back to it, they would certainly have refused. They answered me: "We may be deceitful, wicked and unjust, we know it and weep over it, we grieve over it; we torment and punish ourselves more perhaps than that merciful Judge Who will judge us and whose Name we know not. But we have science, and by the means of it we shall find the truth and we shall arrive at it consciously. Knowledge is higher than feeling, the consciousness of life is higher than life. Science will give us wisdom, wisdom will reveal the laws, and the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness." That is what they said, and after saying such things everyone began to love himself better than anyone else, and indeed they could not do otherwise. All became so jealous of the rights of their own personality that they did their very utmost to curtail and destroy them in others, and made that the chief thing in their lives. Slavery followed, even voluntary slavery; the weak eagerly submitted to the strong, on condition that the latter aided them to subdue the still weaker. Then there were saints who came to these people, weeping, and talked to them of their pride, of their loss of harmony and due proportion, of their loss of shame. They were laughed at or pelted with stones. Holy blood was shed on the threshold of the temples. Then there arose men who began to think how to bring all people together again, so that everybody, while still loving himself best of all, might not interfere with others, and all might live together in something like a harmonious society. Regular wars sprang up over this idea. All the combatants at the same time firmly believed that science, wisdom and the instinct of self-preservation would force men at last to unite into a harmonious and rational society; and so, meanwhile, to hasten matters, "the wise" endeavoured to exterminate as rapidly as possible all who were "not wise" and did not understand their idea, that the latter might not hinder its triumph. But the instinct of self-preservation grew rapidly weaker; there arose men, haughty and sensual, who demanded all or nothing. In order to obtain everything they resorted to crime, and if they did not succeed--to suicide. There arose religions with a cult of non-existence and self-destruction for the sake of the everlasting peace of annihilation. At last these people grew weary of their meaningless toil, and signs of suffering came into their faces, and then they proclaimed that suffering was a beauty, for in suffering alone was there meaning.

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