Hi all,
a short disclaimer:
The excerpts from ‚Crime and Punishment' belong to the brilliant Dostoevsky*. Just couldn't resist to make some references here, because at least to me, Tom and Raskolnikov seem a bit alike in some regards – but judge for yourself ;)
Have fun reading!
For as long as I can remember I've seen too many long faces on too many Christmas mornings. Most of the children in the orphanage didn't want to understand why there were no presents, but the economic reasons had always been crystal clear to me. Mrs Cole and her colleagues had their hands full with providing for three meals and clean clothes, and it left no room for sentimentality, not even on holidays.
Yet this Christmas morning is different. Right after our cold morning walk in the woods, I find a green scarf knitted by Polly underneath the tree in the living room, and here I am, wearing it just as Harper is wearing her blue equivalent.
The mere thought of Polly creating something for me out of nothing with her bare hands – not knowing if I'd even join their festivities to ever see it – all without magic, with her time alone, is quite odd. She put the same care into it as she did for her own daughter, her own flesh and blood, and I can't help but notice that this fact grips me in its sheer incomprehensibility.
For my own gifts in direct comparison, I simply didn't know any better than to buy a few books during a stopover on our train journey. I've never given anything away before. I've studiously avoided exchanging favors, but that would've been impossible this Christmas.
So Polly got not-too-cynical short stories by Oscar Wilde, William thanked me for heavy fare by Kafka.
Harper got Crime and Punishment. Mainly because it's considered Dostoevsky's greatest work and I've always wanted to read it myself … Something of which she was very much aware of, her wink let me know at once. But we're square – my look was just as mischievous once I opened her 'coupon' for butterbeer for whenever I needed butter and sugar …
How strangely people behave. Apparently it's making sense to all of them to wrap up things that no one needs, just to give them to people who've never asked for them. And yet everyone seems to enjoy it.
"Peace and quiet, finally," Edwin sighs blissfully as he drops down on one of the sofas. "Tilda and Yorick should always take anti-cyclical walks to us … Harper, it's too bad your parents joined them."
"They were forced into it, after all," she says, quite lost in thought. She's sitting next to me, leaning over a crossword puzzle at the dining room table. "Also Yorick wouldn't have let up as he didn't want to go alone with Tilda."
"One can hardly blame him," Edwin jokes while I'm already reading into the first pages of Dostoevsky.
… but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows …
An expression of the profoundest disgust gleamed for a moment in the young man's refined face. He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. Soon he sank into deep thought, or more accurately speaking into a complete blankness of mind; he walked along not observing what was about him and not caring to observe it.
… But there was such accumulated bitterness and contempt in the young man's heart, that, in spite of all the fastidiousness of youth, he minded his rags least of all in the street.
… At the time he had put no faith in those dreams and was only tantalising himself by their hideous but daring recklessness. Now, a month later, he had begun to look upon them differently, and, in spite of the monologues in which he jeered at his own impotence and indecision, he had involuntarily come to regard this "hideous" dream as an exploit to be attempted, although he still did not realise this himself.
He – not at all unlike me, apparently neither visually nor in terms of deep thoughts – is dreaming of murder. It's in the preface, but I'd have to lie if I said I hadn't suspected as much.
He was positively going now for a "rehearsal" of his project, and at every step his excitement grew more and more violent. … It was a back staircase, dark and narrow, but he was familiar with it already, „and knew his way, and he liked all these surroundings: in such darkness even the most inquisitive eyes were not to be dreaded.
„If I am so scared now, what would it be if it somehow came to pass that I were really going to do it?" … „Raskolnikov, a student, I came here a month ago," the young man made haste to mutter, with a half bow, remembering that he ought to be more polite.
I read the first, unhappy negotiation between Raskolinkov and Ivanovna, I read how she so completely downplays her usury, solely for her own purposes – and I get it. I understand him. I understand why he plans as he plans. Why he considers her to be insignificant in the context of world history and, intelligent as he is, sees himself above her.
It's well-known arrogance, but here it's mixed with proactive, Darwinian thinking.
Survival of the fittest.
Of the wisest?
And yet, shortly thereafter, he's no longer understanding himself.
„Oh, God, how loathsome it all is! and can I, can I possibly. … No, it's nonsense, it's rubbish!" he added resolutely. "And how could such an atrocious thing come into my head? What filthy things my heart is capable of. Yes, filthy above all, disgusting, loathsome, loathsome!—and for a whole month I've been. …" But no words, no exclamations, could express his agitation. The feeling of intense repulsion, which had begun to oppress and torture his heart while he was on his way to the old woman, had by now reached such a pitch and had taken such a definite form that he did not know what to do with himself to escape from his wretchedness. He walked along the pavement like a drunken „man, regardless of the passersby, and jostling against them, and only came to his senses when he was in the next street.
"Tom," I hear Edwin, "what do you think of the book?"
I briefly look up from my gift for Harper and claim, "I can't tell yet, sir."
What a lie.
Most of all, I'd like to ask him if he, too, is able to identify with a character whose actions will get him stuck with crime and punishment – if only because of the book's title.
I would like to know whether he himself also sees parallels to a cunning, but lost individual, who, after explaining his reasons for doing so in great detail, takes the view that the truly great people have no regard for the lives of the worthless.
On the basis of his answer I could possibly classify whether it's normal to recognize similarities with such a character in oneself. Or whether I'm simply not normal …
No matter how I turn it – the idea doesn't seem to be as easy to reject as it probably should be for me.
Isn't that bad? It probably is.
But possibly the greatest gift and danger of man is solitude. It gives space to indulge in the darkest thoughts – until they become more than just that.
Yet in my usual, habitual solitude, a crossword-puzzling Harper looks up at me to ask, "Poet. A synonym for poet with six letters?"
"Lyrist," I guess after a moment's consideration, propping my head up in my arms on the table.
"That's it, yes," she says, filling in the boxes with those according letters. "Thank you, model student …"
"It's a work of realism, isn't it?" I get back to Edwin after a brief moment of silence. "Crime and Punishment, I mean …"
"Oh yes, indeed, it is," he replies. "That's what makes it so interesting and disturbing at the same time. You begin to toy with the idea that extraordinary people have the right, or even … the moral duty, to put ordinary people behind their higher purposes." He shrugs, as if he'd know fully well that I want to hear arguments to the contrary. Arguments that can convince me otherwise … "Yet a clear vision of reality, with all its relationships, intersections and connections," he continues, touching on redemption ever so casually, "is showing and proving to us that the world must be significantly more complex, and thus in the same way kinder, than such ideologies leave room for."
"So if Tom had ever been prejudiced against mudbloods," Harper is only too happy to move these ideas to tangible levels, "which, by the way, he wasn't ever – he would have to at least realize now, in our immediate presence, that you and I, great-uncle, are not mud at all. He knows us personally and would inevitably have to revise his prejudices. Is that what you mean?"
"Yes, so we might say if we wanted to insult ourselves on the basis of our blood, my dear," Edwin chuckles. "The fallibility of a theoretical ideology is surprisingly easy to test in practice."
"With references to reality." I slowly nod as I begin to feel the quiet, calm relief only a good enough argument could have provided.
"Yes, yes." Edwin smiles. "Theories have to stand up to real people, faces and true stories to work in practice. Raskolnikov was cunning and intelligent enough not to have his crimes traced back to him, and although he firmly believed he could follow the construct of his very own moral code – his conscience would not allow his soul to find the rest it longed for after a double murder. Quite the contrary. He lost a considerable amount of his humanity and split off even more from society. Children, that's why Horcruxes are said to be so painful."
The fact that Harper is now also looking at him, a bit caught at that, is probably putting my own perplexed expression into perspective.
"Don't look at me like that, I know you've already read about it," he laughs, waving it off. "But children, you might learn something else if I tell you that consciously splitting your soul separates you from the rest of the world. From mortality, yes. But also from the true meaning of life. The process must be an unspeakable, physical agony, barely endurable pain – in a short period of time a Horcrux creates what normally happens to a soul over many years, or, at best, of course, doesn't happen at all." He shrugs. "Be that as it may, Raskolnikov would probably not have had to make any apology if his mind had not been so clouded and his heart had only been touched by Sofya earlier. Because love, above all, is capable of rearranging priorities like nothing else in the world. You know?"
"I'm sure we will some day," Harper says.
She smiles at me and in a way I'm comforted by the thought that I have a Sofya right next of me …
"Still, let me throw in questions," Harper says. "Something that makes one wealthy, starting with T – eight letters?"
"Treasure."
"Very good, Riddle!" She nods, writing it down.
"What else are you missing?"
She taps her finger on a line with seven empty boxes. "Greek monster of the underworld."
"Echidna," I think out loud, given some other struts of letters, and it turns out to be correct.
"The mother of monsters?" Edwin sighs in amusement. "According to mythology, one half is a woman with beautiful eyes, the other half a gruesome serpent, huge and ravenous. Speaking of which – don't you think we might want to say Hello to Viper again?"
We both look up in surprise.
"Why?" Harper asks.
"No particular reason." Edwin spreads his arms on the sofa. "I'm just sure she'd appreciate a little company, don't you think so as well?"
"Company?" I skeptically ask.
Harper is raising an eyebrow, too. "Don't snakes prefer peace and quiet – just like you, great-uncle?"
"Oh, you don't believe that yourself …"
Harper and I exchange a glance, and I believe she understands my nonverbal request to kindly leave the snake where it is.
My plan doesn't work at all, though.
I should've known that I'd only make her curious and cut my own flesh …
"All right," she says, almost maliciously, "why not?"
I can barely keep myself from an annoyed groan before she gets up and disappears for a moment.
Edwin, in the meantime, is smiling at me.
Much too benevolently.
What is he up to?
* Excerpt from: Fyodor Dostoevsky. „Crime and Punishment." Apple Books. de/book/crime-and-punishment/id1518041666