Notes from Underground

We don't normally think of the classics of world literature as page turners, but I found especially the second half of Dostoevsky's novella to be exactly that.  It's a bit like watching a slow motion psychological train wreck, at first from a safe distance that makes it seem like someone else's melodrama, but then, as the wreckage careens towards you, increasingly as another potential casualty.  As you might imagine, the pages move faster and faster the closer things come. 

The book relates, in two parts, the first person tail-chasing anguish of a hyper-self-conscious misanthrope.  First, we get a short summary of his ... aborted nihilism? ... I'm not quite sure what to call his description of his philosophy of life.   Afterwards, we hear the story of how he arrived at this life of self-imposed underground isolation.  Overall, we come to feel the way that our own consciousness can become a labyrinth and a sickness.  We learn to distrust the only tool we have for our self-knowledge.  We begin to suspect that thought itself is there merely to torment us and send us in circles.  All this may sound hysterical, and it certainly is.  But simply calling it 'madness' doesn't make it go away, and won't prevent us from slipping into its tortured circular logic.  Instead it forces us to truly ask the question of whether there is any happiness at all in being a modern human.

On a technical note, I read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation that a lot of folks online recommended.  I don't have anything to compare it to, but it seemed to read quite naturally to me, and had an interesting introduction that situates the novella in Dostoevsky's life and times.  Highly recommended.

 

#reread 

   

Buddhism Without Beliefs

After listening to this interesting lecture about a "Buddhist Reformation", I was excited to read Stephen Batchelor's modern agnostic take on Buddhism.  By analogy to Luther's more personal update of Christian dogma, Batchelor's, "Contemporary Guide to Awakening" (as the subtitle calls it) aims to rethink some of the standard ideas of Buddhism so that they appear more relevant to our modern secular culture.  This seems to me a truly noble enterprise.  Naturally, it risks pissing off traditional buddhists on the one side, and delivering a bunch of new age psycho-babble on the other.  Batchelor, however, is a clear thinker with a lot of traditional experience, and he is mostly able to steer a middle road.  Essentially, he ends up treating Buddhism a bit like a version of existentialist philosophy, which I think does some amount of justice to Buddhism, while also providing some amount of useful wisdom for living in the modern world.

Perhaps, then, it's mostly a reflection of how much our Western relationship to Buddhism has changed sine this was written in 1997 that it doesn't really feel important anymore.  There are a lot of interesting thoughts in the book, particularly regarding how to interpret Buddhist ideas like the Four Noble Truths outside of a religious context.  And yet ... it fell a little flat for me.  Maybe this existential and psychological version of Buddhism makes it more universally understandable, but robs it of some of its profundity?  Or maybe we've just incorporated a lot of this perspective already by domesticating "mindfulness".  I'm not clear quite what I'm looking for here, but I know that with the exception of some the couple of chapters at the beginning and towards the end of the book, it read a bit like the sort of sound and thoughtful advice you might get from any wise old grandfather type.

I did find the end of the book, focused on freedom as the liberation from the illusion of freedom and the role of perplexity and questions, quite interesting.  And I also thought it opened strongly, with a great discussion of how to think about the Buddha as an empiricist and an agnostic whose very last goal would have been to found some new religious authority.  These ideas resonate with my own experience of meditation as a sort of great experiment, insofar as they encourage us to think of Buddhism as a set of practices, rather than a system of beliefs.  I particularly liked the way he explained the difference between those perspectives, and what seeing Buddhism as an esoteric set of religious beliefs robs us of:

And the crucial distinction that each truth requires being acted upon in its own particular way (understanding anguish, letting go of its origins, realizing its cessation, and cultivating the path) has been relegated to the margins of specialist doctrinal knowledge. 

 

Runaway

Runaway is the title story is this great collection of Alice Munro short stories.  As you might expect of someone who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing exclusively short stories, Munro is complete master of the genre.  Almost all of them have that wonderful elliptical quality of great short stories where they allude to way more than they actually say, as if there were an orchestra accompanying the soloist from just off-stage.  While you might also expect it, the other exceptional thing about the stories is the variety of women they portray.  Smart, capricious, old, young, vapid, tough.  They are all women you've met, sketched quickly but essentially, in a way that makes you notice how rare it is for a male author to really capture the inner life of these characters.  I guess I'll have to make time to read some of her other story collections.