It is time...

to re-read The Brothers Karamazov. My friend Jared mentioned this epic novel to me today over lunch, and then my friend & colleague (another Matthew) passed along this article from First Things. Blasted First Things! and its substantial prose. I've been wrestling with this other article from First Things for two days now... David Hart is on to something, about the responsibility of Christianity, even better, the Gospel, for this strange modern world it helped to form. I think that Brandon Gallaher is writing about this too, from another angle.

With several people mentiong The Brothers Karamazov today alone, I realized that it has been a few years since I worked through its pathos and glory. But my thinking is slow these days, it seems. Though it wasn't it my mind on the weekend, conversations with Krista and Derek and Mike about family and faith have also got me brooding about the dislocation of meaning in our modern world. It is amazing how things like books acquire new, personal meaning at different seasons of life. I first read Brothers in 1995, in High School, and was exhilarated by its language and emotion. For Mr. Moore's acting class, I staged a reading of Alyosha's scene of exultation after "the odour of corruption" and "the wedding at cana."

Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness. Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still–dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn flowers in the flowerbeds near the house had fallen asleep until morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth to be touched by the mystery of the stars. . . . Alyosha stood gazing and suddenly, as if he had been cut down, he threw himself to the earth. . . .
It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds of God all came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, "touching other worlds." He wanted to forgive everyone for everything, and to ask forgiveness, oh, not for himself! but for all and for everything, "as others are asking for me," rang in his soul.

I've always understood that scene, and not "The Grand Inquisitor," to be the centre and heart of the narrative.

I read it again in the Manchester rain of the year 2000, and in the summer heat of 2003. It is time again...