A note from April 22, Earth Day and I just happened to

Read Page 319 of Brothers K.   Ah! The Beauty of Creation!

Dorothy & Dostoevsky [... the musings of Becca]

Hey, all!

Mark invited me to share what I’ve been thinking about as I read… specifically, what are internal percolating questions. So, here goes! 

First, I’ll confess to you all that I am horribly behind on the reading, which combined with my shyness leads to me being quieter than most during our gatherings. Rest assured, I am listening and love hearing about your observations!

However, I have made my way through has me thinking about Dorothy Day...

As I mentioned during one of our first classes, I was attracted to giving The Brothers Karamazov a shot because it is often mentioned as one of Dorothy Day’s favorite books.

In All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day, Jim Forest writes: “The following year, 1971, Dorothy had an invitation from her friend Nina Polcyn in Chicago to join her in going to Eastern Europe with a tour group led by a professor of theology from Yale… The stops included Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary, but the main part was in Russia - or rather ‘Holy Mother Russia,’ as Dorothy invariably put it even during the Soviet era - the Russia whose authors, icons, and exiles had mattered so much in shaping her Christian faith… Having arrived in Saint Petersburg (still Lenigard at the time), the most important stop for Dorothy was the Saint Alexander Nevsky Monastery. In the monastery cemetery, she prayed at the grave of her beloved Dostoevsky, so many of whose characters she spoke of with the familiarity of friendship and whose fictional Father Zosima in the  Brothers Karamazov was as real to Dorothy as any living friend.” 

As I read, I try to look for connections between the characters and my image of who Dorothy was as a person. How did this book influence her faith? What parts of it influenced the Catholic Worker Movement? What does it say about the Church I am a part of and work for - often begrudgingly and with lots of existential angst? What passages did she mark? What were her notes in the margins?

A few passages that have caught my attention. I muse that they might have also caught Dorothy’s eye: 

The most famous one that we’ve discussed and that she was known to quote: “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” 

An exchange between Miusov and Ivan about the Church: “So far as I understand it, this, then, would be the realization of some ideal, an infinitely remote one, at the Second Coming. That is as you please. A beautiful utopian dream of the disappearance of wars, banks, and so on. Something even resembling socialism.” Sounds a lot like the Catholic Worker to me.

A colleague recently sent our staff this homily after the Church came down once again on same sex couples. Insert huge eye roll. The pastor mentions The Brothers K, specifically the section with the Grand Inquisitor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQhuWUYuN4o

The point the pastor makes about our preference often for institutional certainly over wrestling with our faith actively and struggling to put love into action really hits home. Also, I want to clone this priest. We need more like this one.

Finally, all of the above makes me think of one of Dorothy Day’s counterpart in the Catholic Worker Movement, Peter Maurin. I will leave you with one of his more famous of his easy essays: 

Blowing the Dynamite 

Writing about the Catholic Church 

a radical writer says: 

“Rome will have to do more 

than play a waiting game; 

she will have to use 

some of the dynamite 

inherent in her message.”

to blow the dynamite 

of a message 

is the only way 

to make the message dynamic. 

If the Catholic Church 

is not today 

the dominant social dynamic force, 

it is because Catholic scholars

have failed to blow the dynamite 

of the Church. 

Catholic scholars 

have taken the dynamite 

of the Church, 

have wrapped it up 

in a nice phraseology, 

placed it in a an hermetic container 

and sat on the lid. 

It is about time 

to blow the lid off 

so the Catholic Church 

may again become 

the dominant social dynamic force.

How can I be this dynamite both at work and in my personal life? What do I need to wrestle with to put love into action? Where am I falling short or where am I succeeding? How can I be present and mindful like Alyosha? What would our world look like if the Church actually acted like Jesus? 

The end.

See you tonight!

Dostoevsky Wrote That Beauty Will Save the World [by Mark]

for Chris Wallach

Years ago
A friend gave me a Thomas Merton book–
New Seeds of Contemplation—
He inscribed it with the following
From poet W.H. Auden:
“The funniest and kindest of mortals
Are those who are most aware
Of the baffle of being”

About you
I’d say:
“The funnest and kindest of mortals
Are those who are most aware
Of the beauty of interbeing”

Chris & Carrie

Beautiful and Toxic Multitudes [by Mark]

Jewish because reading Dostoyevsky at 13  I write poems at restaurant tables Lower East Side, perfect delicatessen intellectual

–Allen Ginsberg, Yiddishe Kopf

Prompted by a recent tragedy, I turned again to the conclusion of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I cried as I reread the exchanges between Kolya and Alyosha, thinking all the while of what dear friends have lost. I remembered how, many years ago in mid-May, as a treat to myself after the academic year, I’d reread Dostoevsky’s last novel. Just this morning I began perusing volume five of Jospeh Frank’s acclaimed biography of the Russian novelist. Imagine: An assiduous Jewish academic spending decades of his life writing about the times and life of, yes, a magnificent writer as well as an anti-Semite. This led me to return to Leonid Tsypkin’s novel Summer in Baden-Baden, which shifts quickly back and forth from the narrator going to Leningrad to check out the sites of Dostoevsky’s fans to the Dostoevskys as a married couple going to Dresden (Baden-Baden) where we see the extremes of the Russian writer with his gambling, self-loathing, and self-abasement before his bride-secretary, before the narrator ends up visiting an older friend, Gilda Yakovlevna, after which is how the novel ends, with “Tsypkin,” a Russian Jew reflecting on how and why it is that so many Jews like himself are Fyodorophiles, even though Dostoevsky despised Jews. Frank and Tsypkin forego the “all or none” mentality. Rather, they somehow hold it all, recognizing but not freaking out at the “both/and” of the beautiful and toxic in Dostoevsky the person. Of course, so many of Dostoevsky’s riveting characters—Dmitri Karamazov being an obvious example—are charged with just this gripping interbeing of the noble and ignoble. “I loved depravity, I also loved the shame of depravity. I loved cruelty: am I not a bedbug, an evil insect? In short – a Karamazov!” “I understand now that for men such as I a blow is needed, a blow of fate, to catch them as with a noose and bind them by an external force. Never, never would I have risen by myself! But the thunder has struck. I accept the torment of accusation and of my disgrace before all, I want to suffer and be purified by suffering. And perhaps I will be purified, eh, gentlemen? But hear me, all the same, for the last time: I am not guilty of my father’s blood!” I remember Susan Sontag (another Jew obsessed with Russian literature) on Tsypkin’s novel: “If you want from one book an experience of the depth and authority of Russian literature, read this book. If you want a novel that can fortify your soul and give you a larger idea of feeling, and of breathing, read this book.” But don’t stop there. Solzhenitsyn had his manias; is that a reason to avoid One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich? Is the moral crankiness and dreary dogmatism of the later Tolstoy grounds for passing up Hadji Murad?

Newsy Note from Mama Fitz [via Mark

 Barb gave me permission to share her emails...

February 10, 2021

Dear Professor,   

Wanted to share with you that I felt strange about last night. So I prayed about it.   Seems like group is still shy. I’ve never zoomed before so this format is new to me.   I guess it’s a matter of giving and receiving.  Then I realized in this group God’s idea is for me to try to be like Elder, Fr Zossima, which means looking to see how I can give to others rather than receive, to radiate kindness and help others feel comfortable about sharing. 

Loved the Tokyo story: kind words rather than muscle helps others more.

Also, the bit about reading classics when young and again when older. I was 21 when I read BK the first time. Now, that I am 76, 55 years later, the characters speak more strikingly to me. A bit of living makes a dif.

Thanks for making this opportunity available to us.   You are so good!

Looking for my book today. |

Peace, Barb

Barb and Annie

Indeclinable [by Mark]

Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom

Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations With Phillippe Nemo

Jill Robbins, Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas

A person dear to me is finishing her PhD and MD in the near future. As I have been reading the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, I am continually reminded of how she has embodied a tireless responsibility over the last decade for the uprooted, the imprisoned, and the vulnerable.

 

Philosophy—love of wisdom—prevents one from going back to sleep.

Q: How, concretely, is responsibility for the other translated? A: The other concerns me in all his material misery. It is a matter eventually of nourishing him, of clothing him. It is exactly the biblical assertion: clothe the naked, feed the hungry, give shelter to the shelterless. The material side of man, the material life of man concerns me, and, in the other, takes on for me an elevated signification and concerns my holiness…. As if with regard to the other I had responsibilities starting from eating and drinking.

The otherwise than being is attested to by exceptional people, by saints and just ones and by the “thirty-six unknown just ones” to whom the world owes its continued life.

[Shoshani] didn’t teach piety; he taught the texts. The texts are more fundamental—and vaster—than piety.

[Before the face of the other] I am he who finds the resources to respond to the call.

The study of the Torah is this infinity that is never finished, where the light gained illumines above all the insufficiencies of the light acquired

The face offers itself to your compassion and to your obligation.

Wittgenstein [by Mark]

 A friend sent me the following from a Wikipedia page on Ludwig Wittgenstein...

He discovered Leo Tolstoy's 1896 The Gospel in Brief at a bookshop in Tarnów, and carried it everywhere, recommending it to anyone in distress, to the point where he became known to his fellow soldiers as "the man with the gospels".^[166][167]

The extent to which The Gospel in Brief influenced Wittgenstein can be seen in the Tractatus, in the unique way both books number their sentences.^[168]1916 Wittgenstein read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov so often that he knew whole passages of it by heart, particularly the speeches of the elder Zosima, who represented for him a powerful Christian ideal, a holy man "who could see directly into the souls of other people".^[78][169]

Iain King has suggested that Wittgenstein's writing changed substantially in 1916, when he started confronting much greater dangers during frontline fighting.^[170] Russell said he returned from the war a changed man, one with a deeply mystical and ascetic attitude.^[171