I went down to the Piraeus

Han’s Holbien’s painting, Christ’s Body in the Tomb that inspired The Idiot This book charts the journey of Mhyskin, a sheltered prince back into 19th Century Russian society following his medically induced exile in Switzerland.  He embodies the Christian morality and generosity of soul that Dostoyevsky prized.  His singular lack of malice or avarice generates suspicion and ridicule from the worldly chattering classes of St Petersburg.  It is both a tragic story for the suffering endured by saintly Mhyskin, and also an indictment of the vice-ridden society who spurn and torment this angelic figure.  Like his other works, the typically bleak setting is dotted with the desperate, dying and deluded.    One of the most memorable dialogues happen almost at the beginning of the book, where Mhyskin reflects on capital punishment and the emotions felt by the condemned.  This part is not a work of fiction.  Dostoevsky himself was sentenced to death, before...

  ‘I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Galucon, son of Ariston’, so begins one of the foundational texts of Western philosophy, Plato’s Republic.  The Piraeus is the port of Athens.  It was an enthralling place.  Cultures meshed, people of different stations jostled, and the churn of peoples produced intellectual ferment.   In the original Greek, ‘down’ or Κατέβην, is the same term used to denote Odysseus’ passage to Hades.  It is better translated as a ‘descent’.  This suggests transcendence, a shift from the usual realm of human experience.  It is in this manner, Plato has Socrates remove himself from the usual concerns of city life, and descend to the Piraeus to answer the pivotal questions of what goodness, reality and knowledge are.   When opening a book, you embark on the very same journey.  You descend to the Piraeus also.  You escape your surroundings and the material world, and engage in dialogue with disemb...

  There is nothing remotely ordinary about the Congo.  To read about it is akin to poring over an anthology of superlatives.  Its reserves of natural resources combined with its vast population give it colossal economic potential.  Its river, that coiled snake extending to the forested depths of the continent, is the second largest in the world by the volume of water it discharges into the Atlantic.  From a literary view, it is often depicted as a realm transcendent of usual human experience.   Conrad wrote of it in Heart of Darkness: ‘ The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence ’ In A Bend in the River, more on that here, V.S. Naipaul describes the ‘ land taking you back to som...

  “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. ” – Heraclitus  Heraclitus is not merely conducting a study of hydrology.  This fragment captures the ephemerality of life.  A river as a physical feature is defined by its flux.  If it stood still, it would be a lake or a pond.  Constant change is no less inherent to life on earth.  Our world is necessarily transient, the planet itself is moving at a thousand miles an hour, our bodies alter with age and our minds with experience.   Most change is gradual.  It is not noticeable day to day, but if you look back, it is unlikely that you feel you are the same person you were a year ago, or even two months prior.  It takes such a moment of perspective to comprehend the forces moving just under our feet.  However, there are some occasions when this usually entropic, gradual change becomes very apparent.  This is when we say good...

Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment traces the inner life of the dark and tormented Raskolnikov after he murders two women.  Before the killing, Raskolnikov believes that his evil will be vindicated by the good he will do after stealing the woman’s money to launch his career.  However, after the murder, feverish guilt, anxiety and disgust at his actions overwhelm him.  In the background, Tsarist St Petersburg is a hellscape, sweltering hot and populated by bestial figures guilty of every vice.  The good are subjected to suffering and derision beneath a deaf heaven.   Even after spending years studying the excesses and brutalities of 2000 years of human history, I found many sections of this book difficult to read.  For me, the most tragic characters of the book were those who had fallen from grace and clung onto their faded grandeur to the mocking of the heartless mob.  Katerina Ivanovna, a well born widow, driven to live in squalor, wracked by tub...

  The plot of A Bend in the River follows the journey of Salim, a member of an Indian trading family, from the East coast of Africa to an unnamed town in an unknown African country.  He establishes himself as a merchant, and witnesses convulsions of tribal warfare and the establishment of an overbearing military regime.  Salim has a tortured love affair and friendships with other expats which expose the absurdity of the human condition.  The book is set in a bleak cosmology where decay and broken dreams are the nature of existence. Eruptions of cruelty sporadically occur without pattern or reason in an amoral world.  The arbitrary government and silent heavens do not bring happiness and prosperity, so the characters aspire to assign their own meaning and purpose to the life they eke out beside the Congo.    However, Salim and others find no solace in their inner life. An entoptic nihilism infuses the inner reaches of the book.  Like bold visions ...