I’ve been reading a bunch of Dostoyevsky this year. Well, ever since Norm died last fall, I’ve been reading a lot of Russian literature in general in his honour, because he was a fan and I realized I hadn’t read that much Russian stuff. I ended up going through Tolstoy, and now I’m working my way through good old Dusty. I would say FD is tougher than Tolstoy, but only because FD has written more books and it’s a lot more shit to sit through.
I started The Brothers Karamazov a couple months ago, and I’ve been stuck. I’m still trying to read it when I can find the time, of course. I started in February I think, life is hella busy right now for me, and I’ve unfortunately had to read it on and off, which is not how I prefer to read books. (The best way to read a book, in my opinion, is just like how you watch a movie: zero outside intervention, no distractions, and in the least amount of sittings or pauses possible). But regardless of what is happening in my daily life, I’m still trying to read the book when I have the energy and focus leftover to do so, because it’s been quite good so far.
One of my favourite passages I’ve encountered in the novel thus far is this one:
“I think everyone must love life more than anything else in the world.'
'Love life more than the meaning of it?'
'Yes, certainly. Love it regardless of logic, as you say. Yes, most certainly regardless of logic, for only then will I grasp its meaning. That's what I've been vaguely aware of for a long time. Half your work is done, Ivan: you love life. Now you must try to do the second half and you are saved.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
If you read the most recent thing I wrote, you might remember I discussed what I feel is, “divine intervention.” This quote brings that concept to mind again, but it also reminds me of another very important thing, which is: it can be sort of helpful to look at life as one long stretch of constant suffering. Just like the shit Buddhists and spiritual people tend to say: once you accept that life is awful, you are more equipped to move forward in a healthier way. It’s not about being a pessimist and looking at the world miserably, it is merely about being a realist, not being surprised when things are shitty, and expecting them. It’s a thin line you’re dancing on, but there is a difference between looking at life clearly and negatively.
The Dostoevsky quote is perfect for what I’m trying to describe: in some ways, life can be so confounding you have to marvel at the sheer scope of it all. “Loving life” more than anything else in the world also means enjoying your adversity and your struggle, because that is part of the “good,” as well. (The yin and yang, etc. You can’t have the good without the bad, I’m sure you’ve heard that already). When you’re in the middle of a bad time in life, it’s hard to remember this, because the situation might be so bad you feel like it’s permanent and you’re gonna be tortured forever. I complain a lot on here, and I’m sure I don’t need to again, but I will anyway for the sake of this article: I am often bummed out about how I’m 30, getting older, I live with my parents, nothing is happening for me, I don’t have a girlfriend, most likely never will because I’m 5’3”, and my career never took off, etc etc.
But at the same time, this shit is all kinda funny too. It’s tragic to know that I’m currently in the best shape of my life, and I’ll never be this healthy again probably, and yet I’m wasting away working at a job I never thought I’d be doing. I can literally feel my life being wasted in real time, and it depresses me to an extraordinary degree. But like I mentioned: it’s also hilarious. The fact that we all die someday makes everything that feels awful much funnier than it seems at first, because this life is really just a prequel to where we’re all eventually gonna end up. Like, on one hand, it is incredibly depressing to have to watch people I consider to be mediocre do really well in life. There are lots of whores on Instagram, for example, who share lots of vacation photos and adventures all around the world. None of these people are what I would consider to be intelligent or “good” people. I mean, their carbon footprint alone is enough to get them sent to hell, on a moral level alone, if you want to boil things down to a base level of judgment like that. All of these people I see doing better in life than me make me angry and annoyed, because I know almost none of them deserve it, and the average Filipino janitor, for example, works much harder in life, gets paid very little, and doesn’t get any vacations. This is infuriating and sad: the people that work the hardest in life are often unrewarded for their efforts. A rich person’s dog gets to go on more vacations than I do, probably.
And yet……you still have to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation. Why should I be upset if someone who doesn’t do anything of value for anyone gets to inherit their parents’ money and go to Europe 900 times a year? Why should I be angry if I ask a girl out, she says no, and then she gets into a relationship with some guy who is taller and much dumber than I am? It’s enough to make a person angry, for sure, but it’s also something to laugh about because of the illogical nature of life. Some days nothing fucking feels like it makes any sense. Everything is upside down and backwards, and as a result, funnier and kind of enjoyable. The ideas we have in our minds about how sweet and wonderful life could be (shoutout to Marvin Gaye haha) do not correspond with the illogical nature of what life is actually like in reality. This disparity and tension that exists between what life should be, and what it actually is, is ripe for comedy. There are small pockets of life that pop up, if you’re observant enough to catch em, that make all the suffering and stress and bullshit we have to go through worth it.
Another quote that comes to mind is from The Beach Bum, but stolen from J.D. Salinger. Moondog says at one point, “I’m quite certain that the universe is conspiring to make me happy.” I can relate to this and I think that no matter what happens, there is always some sort of good to be found if you look properly. The punchline might not happen right away, and it might not even be really clear or obviously understandable, but it’s there somewhere, almost like a math problem to figure out the humour of. Another quote that comes to mind would be the conclusion of Louis CK’s famous Russia story, “No matter how bad life gets, it's still fucking funny." To tie it back to the famous Russian I began this one with, this is what is meant in The Brothers Karamazov when Dusty talks about, “loving life more than the meaning of it,” and “regardless of logic.” Sometimes life can be really stressful, shitty, unfair, and just plain wrong, but that’s the challenge: loving even those parts, because it’s all part of getting to the punchline. It requires some inner strength and bravery to make it out the shitty parts, because when you find your altitude again it makes it worth it, and hopefully balances out the awful parts.
There are times in life I feel that comedy is not something you “create,” but something you kinda “find” and “catch,” if you catch my drift, lol. To give you an example of what I mean: if you read my work, you might remember I had a slight car crash in the snow a couple months ago. As of today it’s been two months and a day since the day of that accident. I was gazing at my car and admiring how it looked in the setting sun recently, and for some inexplicable reason, I had a moment of amusement come over me. I don’t know if I can explain the “joke” of this to you, or the “punchline” here, because I’m not sure there is one. All I can tell you is that it was a sort of Proustian moment with the Madeleine, but instead of thinking about my whole life coming back to me and everything, the only thing that came rushing to mind was the humour of the whole situation: I hit my fucking car in the dead of winter, fucked up the front of it, fucked up my back, felt miserable….and now it’s beautifully sunny weather, the car is fixed and looking pretty again, and my back is feeling a lot better. So now, after having experienced that shit, I can now enjoy this shit again with a renewed sense of appreciation. That’s not to say I did not appreciate my car and having good health/no back pain before, of course I did, but obviously now I know what it’s like to not have those things again and it makes me better off in a way.
Another way of thinking about this stuff is something my mom tells me from time to time. She’s a real religious person (and tried her best to raise me the same way, but I’m not very good at it). A concept she likes to remind me of is the idea that I’m, “being saved.” Just the other day she mentioned it again and asked me, “You don’t see you’re being saved?” The context of this is, for example, let’s say something goes wrong for me. Or let’s say I’m generally complaining about how I perceive my life to be at the time, and bitching about how much more I want out of life, and how I’m not getting it, etc (the usual stuff you’ve heard from me if you visit this website). My mom will say the, “being saved,” thing, which means that my path is already the correct one, regardless of whatever I wanted to happen/didn’t happen. In other words, the religious view is that I experienced some kind of short-term loss or obstacle (trying to say the word “obstacle” instead of “failure” lately because I took this course on reframing situations and being more conscious about your language the other day), and it feels like the worst thing in the world. However, in the long run, I was really being set up for something else. I’m not saying a “reward” will come, or that I’ll even be rewarded at all, all I’m saying is that the very same thing I perceived to be the initial loss might have really been the reward right there. For example: some girl might have “humbled” me (trying not to say “rejected” anymore either, haha), but she might age poorly, start looking mid by 35, and I ended up dodging a bullet. This has happened a couple times: some of the girls that didn’t reciprocate my feelings in the past are not people I would choose as partners now, to put it nicely. Another example of this would be the Mac Miller thing I’ve talked about before: what if I got super rich in my early 20s and could do anything I wanted? I would’ve probably died of some kinda drug overdose by now, or AIDS from a hooker, or a plane crash on my way to Paris, who the hell knows? My life might not be what I want it to be, but I’ve been “saved” many times.