29. A harsh and dreadful thing.
One sunny summer afternoon in the early 90’s, in the leafy green suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, my best friend Lexi and I were bored.
Maybe it was a day off from our jobs at the Freshëns Yogurt at Cumberland Mall, the last stop in the back corner of the decaying food court, where fluorescent lights flickered and we gave away half of the chocolate fudge frozen yogurt brownie sundaes we made because the ceiling leaked sludgy water onto the cash register until the drawer wouldn’t open and we couldn’t make change; where we smothered the other half of the sundaes we made in Reese’s Pieces and whipped cream and wet walnuts and took them to the back room to eat together while smoking Camels at the small break table next to the time clock; where the ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts and our manager came in every few days between cocaine benders to call his NA sponsor from the shop phone, head in his hands.
But on this day, we were not at work. Instead, we were bored at my house, lounging in the living room, languishing under pillows and quilts in the chill of the air-conditioning, on the couch newly upholstered in rich, jewel-toned Jacobean peonies on thick ivory cotton, choruses of cicadas buzzing and clicking to a crescendo every few seconds in the woods on the other side of the sliding glass door.
We clicked through the channels on the TV, until we landed on a broadcast of the new made-for-TV Hal Hartley film Surviving Desire in its opening scene: a sexy literature professor named Jude (played by Martin Donovan) has been passionately reading and re-reading the same passage from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov for months, obviously tortured by its implications and tangled in its questions. The whole class is fed up with Jude’s ruminations and revolts, except Sophie (played by Mary B. Ward), the sexy, precocious undergrad with a soft, dark pixie cut, the only one who truly understands him.
“I believe that you are sincere and good at heart,” the professor starts, as the class groans and sighs.
“If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it,” he continues, as a book vaults across the room and lands on the chalkboard behind his head.
“Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.” He walks around the classroom as it becomes more deserted, and sits next to Sophie, who looks at him the way that some men imagine their waitresses, bartenders, and undergrad students are looking at them: with rapt, doe-eyed attention.
“Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love.”
We were rapt, doe-eyed. We, too, wanted to know what it meant to not be frightened by our own faint-heartedness in attaining love. We, too, wanted to be sincere and good of heart. We wanted to be Sophie AND the professor. We decided to read the Brothers Karamazov, and we did, together, chapter by chapter, discussing it over the landline at night—a teenage existential1 book club of two (I also got the pixie haircut).
We read like that, back then: in one 6th grade season (spring) I remember reading Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley, Gone with the Wind (twice), and Clan of the Cave Bear (I still think about that book, like, once a week), in between all the books in the Flowers in the Attic series and who knows what else (in contrast, my current instagram-addled brain has managed to read almost two and a half books over the course of the nine months of this year so far). Nobody cared that every single one of those books was full of rape and incest (I suppose not unlike the bible) because time reading was unquestionably considered time well spent and so we read, voraciously, the more salacious the book the better.
But when we found Dostoyevsky something changed. After The Brothers Karamazov there was The Idiot, then Notes from Underground, with its opening lines of “I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” I mean, come on! So wonderful, so romantic and dramatic and so lovably silly in its overreach. After that, the short stories, most beloved among them The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, which begins: “I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before. But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now, even when they laugh at me—and, indeed, it is just then that they are particularly dear to me.”
I loved his characters so much, their frailties and madnesses and arduous destinies. The questions the characters grappled with took shape in my mind, and didn’t seem too unlike the questions I couldn’t reconcile in my own life: how plain it was that we were living in ways that exacerbated the suffering of others—the anxiety of suddenly being able to draw a direct line from our air conditioning and our automobiles to the newly erupted Gulf War—the obvious discrepancy between the teachings of the church my family attended three times a week and the conspicuously wealthy lives of the congregation, and besides, the crucifixion itself no longer made any sense to me and nobody else could explain that, either. The world seemed happy, but just beneath the surface there was so much horror and cruelty. And there were the things I didn’t talk about, or even know how to allow myself to think about: my sister on heroin, my [redacted] sent away, tricked into inpatient psychiatric treatment. Like Jude and Sophie, I didn’t find the answers in the pages of books, but I found companions, I found resonance in asking the questions.
And now, here I am, more than thirty years later, with more unanswerable questions than ever before, more impossible dissonances for my mind to puzzle over and try to reconcile: as of today, the death toll in Libya from flooding has reached 11,300, and someone brought a big box of saltwater taffy from down the shore to work last week. An earthquake killed 2,800 people in Morocco, and I scored three really nice dresses at the thrift store yesterday. Every day seems more absurd than the one before: 5 babies overdosed on fentanyl at a day care in the Bronx (one died), while I ride a train to New York City carrying a little wooden Brie box full of candles and matches held together by a rubber band to sing happy birthday to my son at the Chelsea Square Diner. None of it makes any sense.
The third book I’ve cracked open this year is a big one: Existential Psychotherapy by Irving Yalom. I was first introduced to Yalom’s work through his textbook on group therapy that I was required to read in graduate school, and I was drawn to his clinical voice: both warm and erudite, both compassionate and scholarly. In Existential Psychotherapy, Yalom describes the four ultimate concerns (or “givens”) of existence: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.
“If we must die, if we constitute our own world, if each is ultimately alone in an indifferent universe, then what meaning does life have? Why do we live? How shall we live? If there is no pre-ordained design for us, then each of us must construct our own meanings in life. Yet can a meaning of one’s own creation be sturdy enough to bear one’s life? This existential dynamic conflict stems from the dilemma of a meaning-seeking creature who is thrown into a universe that has no meaning.”
Yeah, baby, that’s the stuff.
Last night as Duncan and I were reading in bed (and by reading I mean scrolling on our phones, but also probably reading), I asked him if he knew about the Biden impeachment inquiry—I had missed the news and he tried to explain it to me. But soon I stopped him—recoiling from the the fact of it all, deciding that the indignity of a looming, interminable Trump v. Biden presidential election was just too demoralizing to even think about right now; that I want to stay clearly oriented in the reality of what is happening while maintaining my humanity, my dignity, my capacity for love, and sometimes the only way to do that is refuse to give in to rage and hopelessness, even when nothing matters.
In the passage from Brothers Karamazov quoted in Surviving Desire, Zosima continues his treatise, “I am sorry I can say nothing more to console you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.”
It’s not supposed to be easy, all this messy death and freedom. But love is a worthy antidote to meaninglessness and isolation—active love, that harsh and dreadful thing.
The World.
Recommended reading this week includes
in Elle on #tradwife influencers:“they seem to promise a life where you get to stop scrambling to do it all, where there’s actually time to do things like bake a cake, or make clothing you like, or just be with your children without an agenda—that doesn’t mean you should become a #tradwife. It just means that we’ve normalized the substitution of women’s labor for a functioning social safety net, and still organize society as if every family has an adult who doesn’t work outside the home, when that’s not the reality for 80 percent of American families.”
And
at with write what you know and other worthless advice.The Emperor.
The Emperor represents the linear, masculine principle: logic, order, structure, discipline, authority. Sometimes his can be a harsh and punishing energy, but on his best days he represents benefic protection, safety through boundaries, and being the author of one’s life (the root of the world authority being author, after all). This week, I hope you get to define the borders of yourself, for yourself, and that you are seen by others as who you know yourself to be.
Home + The World explores the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. All content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.
⚔️❤️ Jodi
Important to note that, though Dostoyevsky’s works grapple with existential themes and questions beautifully, he himself was not an existentialist.
Elvis & me, yes, but Dostoevsky!? I def wasn’t that cultured in junior/high school!
That #tradwife line ab how we still structure life like there’s someone managing the home is do spot on! I gave the talk ab food waste last fall & basically my conclusion was- “y’all there’s nobody at home taking care of things! This is real work managing a home and pantry/fridge/etc. You aren’t gonna solve this stuff by me teaching you to pickle your collard stems. Sorry!”