old endings and new beginnings

This Halloween I was going to fulfill another teenage dream: be a Playboy Bunny. But instead of going to the party in San Fransisco yesterday, I stayed home, contemplated and then streamed “Jesus Christ Superstar” with Critical Companion on netflix.

«Но тут уж начинается новая история, история постепенного обновления человека,

история постепенного перерождения его, постепенного перехода из одного мира в другой,

знакомства с новою, доселе совершенно неведомою действительностью.

Это могло бы составить тему нового рассказа, – но теперешний рассказ наш окончен.»

[конец Преступления и наказания, Ф. М. Достоевский]

“But here begins a new history, the history of the gradual renewal of a human being,
the history of her gradual rebirth, her  gradual transition from one world to another,
of meeting a new, hitherto completely unknown reality.

This could become the subject of a new story, – but our current story is finished.” 

[the end of Crime and Punishment, F. M. Dostoevsky]

We talked about Halloween costumes before class on Friday and another graduate student told me that he is always Indiana Jones for Halloween. He also told me that it was the Indiana Jones movies that had made him want to go to grad school as a teenager – he always wanted to be that kind of professor when he grew up. Sometimes it seems to me that he is already playing that part and that it fits him very well. I told him that I had always wanted to dress up in a bunny costume for Halloween and that this was for me also connected to the movie which made me want to go to grad school when I was a teenager: “Legally Blonde”. Elle Woods also ran into difficulties during her time at Harvard and wanted to leave but she pulled through – with a little bit of help from kind people around her, of course. This is a side not but worthy to be mentioned.

Thank you to everyone who wrote to me after yesterday’s post – either by way of posting a comment here or sending me a private mail. This support means the world to me. To hear other people’s stories is always useful and to get another perspective equally helpful. Thank you again! The support I received during these past couple of days from people in my immediate surroundings has been as productive – as it turns out, I have my own fair share of kind people here who don’t want me to leave because they’ve formed relationships with me which are meaningful to them. After having questioned my own worth as an individual for the past couple of days and feeling like I am nothing at all, it was refreshing to once again meet myself – bit by bit, step by step – and realize that I don’t have to be anyone else or try to be anything at all for I am already loved just as I am.

Sometime tomorrow – UN apparently decided this – there will be seven billion people on our Earth. Critical Companion says that the world cannot sustain that many human beings but I don’t agree with her – and neither do I always have to – because in my opion no one is ever ‘extra’ but was put on this earth with a purpose. Sometimes this purpose is only to live life and form relationships with other people – for it is in and through our relationships with others that we become as individuals [Critical Companion, who is still on Facebook, once told me she found it puzzling that you can state that you are ‘in a relationship’ on that site for who is not in a relationship of somekind? Or in several?] – but that may be enough to justify one’s existence. Seven billion people equal seven billion births that entail both a mother and a father. Even if the seven billion fathers out there in the world – now I’m speaking very generally and really oversimplifying things – all had cancer, it doesn’t change the fact that when my father has cancer it still affects me without so much as a thought about what everyone else is going through and that everyone else might have gone through the very same thing. I only have one father and he is the only father I am ever going to know. Even if this experience is not niether unique nor exclusive it is still the first time I’m experiencing it and I’m entitled to the full range of emotions I am feeling in connection to this. The life – and possible death – of my father might not mean anything to most people, but this particular man is half of the union which made me into who I am today. Thus, when I imagine the world around me I cannot picture it without him. There is no need for me to do so either because it is my right as an autonomous human being to choose for myself what is of importance in my own human experience. I think seven billion people should constitue a great resource for exploring human experience – seven billion lives which are all different and special and to be cherished for their own discrete worth. In my opinion, rather than being afraid of what being ‘too many’ would inflict on this earth of ours we should celebrate each life and treasure each individual’s value as having come into existence not to be anything in particular but simply to be. Maybe this is a very humanistic approach. But it is the approach I choose to take and I also think that if we don’t value each human life as it is then we can never truly value our own life. Sometimes you need to start with yourself until you can reach others; at other times, you must start with others before you reach yourself.

Today I read the first part of Crime and Punishment. This is probably the novel I have read the most times in my life – I think I’m even understating this reality when I claim to have read it ten times by now. I have owned it in so many copies – in three languages to that – that I’ve had to give most of them away with time. With me in Berkeley I have it in a volume which my advisor at Ural State gave me as a gift when I defended my MA thesis [he gave me the eight published volumes of the Petrozavodsk edition of Dostoevsky’s collected works and this is why these volumes mean a lot ot me]. It is strange how every time you read a novel the work itself is always different and seems brand new even though you know most of it by heart. This is because you can never read it with the same eyes for you are never the same person now as you were the last time – it is sort of like when they say you can’t step into the same river twice. This time what spoke to me most about this novel was the relationships in which Raskolnikov finds himself, and it occurred to me that my favorite quote from it which I love to repeat – «Понимаете, что значит, когда человеку некуда идти?» [“Do you understand what it means when a person has nowhere to go?”] – isn’t actually a reflection of Raskolnikov’s situation. Raskolnikov has plenty of places he can go and kind people he can turn to; the difference is he chooses not to do so. There is always a choice. Sometimes the most important thing is not to recognize what one chooses but what one does not choose. At the end of each day, there is always a choice – and there is always somewhere and to someone you might go. Only when you think you have no other options life gets messy. I guess this explains why Raskolnikov decided to murder that poor old woman – he failed to recognize the other choices at his disposal.

But that’s a very personal reading and probably as unprofessional an interpretation.