Introduction to Russian Literature is one of a few “must take before you graduate or you will live the rest of your existence in a sad little hole” classes at my university. I took it this quarter, and I’m thankful — in the belated Thanksgiving spirit — for having done so, because not only were the lectures and readings fascinating, the class affirmed my outlook on life.
If you read my last post from eons ago, you may recall that I was reading Atlas Shrugged. Well, I finished the novel not long after that post in hopes of entering an essay contest, but that plan exploded in a productivity fail, and all I was left with was flabbergastedness. In fact, two friends and I wandered around a local arts and nightlife district and we ended up talking for several hours at a donut café and I basically had an existential breakdown because of that book. While I agree with Ayn Rand that we must pursue our individual interests and use our own skills to work productively, that we should have a purpose, and that we shouldn’t victimize ourselves or allow others to victimize us, among other things, some aspects of her philosophy just don’t seem to be truly or realistically applicable to society today. One of the themes of the book is that the foremost form of depravity is the lack of purpose, but isn’t a, well, depraved purpose much more depraved than no purpose at all? Isn’t it natural for us to spend a good chunk of our lives finding purpose? Also, while the weak shouldn’t benefit at the expense of the strong, isn’t it kind of…right to help others, especially if the “strong” can give the “weak” the resources they need to contribute to society? I agreed with so much of the book, but, at the same time, couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I admired Dagny Taggart and her fellow heroes, but also found something unsettling about them. Maybe it’s because I’m one of the “weak” ones and I will never be like Dagny no matter how hard I try. I don’t know.
What I do know is that the books we read in Russian Lit — The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina — along with our professor’s interpretations of those books spoke much more to my life. Judging by the number of people who sign up for and rave about the class each year, it spoke to their lives, too.
In fact, not only is Russian Lit a must-take class, rumor on campus has it that in the last lecture, you learn the meaning of life, so some people just attend the last class in hopes of making their lives that much more meaningful. While it’s true that on the last day the professor gave his philosophy and the thoughts of the authors whose works we read on how to live with meaning and purpose, I don’t think you could’ve appreciated it unless you’d been to all, or at least most, of the lectures. After all, everything in life is a process. That was actually one of the themes of the class. Now, I realize that “everything’s a process” is a statement that seems obvious to most people, Kanye West included, but a lot of us, myself included, don’t always live that way.
Case in point: Hello, New Year’s resolutions. Or political reform. Or any far-fetched goals, really. How many times have you wanted to do something big but failed because you didn’t fully plan out the steps in between that would have allowed that big thing to happen? What about when you’ve wanted to change something about yourself (like maybe working out more often), but couldn’t because old habits die hard? We can only achieve reform, whether it be on a personal or societal level, through gradual changes in our personal or collective habits (collective habits = culture). In Anna Karenina, Levin isn’t happy with Russian agricultural productivity, so he constructs this grand plan to imitate what European farmers do. Needless to say, it doesn’t work because Russian peasants’ habits are completely different from European farmers’. Kitty does the same with self-improvement instead of agricultural reform by emulating a friend whom she thinks is the ideal saintly person to be, but she realizes how fake that is.
That brings me to my next point: it’s hopeless to copy what other people or other societies do, because even if you get past the insincerity, the best you can do is work with the situation you’re given. And those situations, along with life in general, are largely based on chance. That’s not to say our choices are powerless; it just means that our choices need to reflect evolving circumstances. That’s my interpretation, at least, of Dostoevsky’s focus on choice and Tolstoy’s focus on chance. There is chance and choice, but there is no predestined fate, and there is no reason behind everything. You know how people like to say “everything happens for a reason”? Well, we all like explanations that make ourselves feel better (believing in fate equates to absolving ourselves of responsibility), but most of the time, life can’t be reduced to cause and effect. If anything, there are multiple causes and reasons, some of which we might not even know. There was no single reason that that telemarketer called at that time and scared you and made you spill your coffee, and there was no reason that that asshole decided to run that red light and make a nice dent in the side of your car. It wasn’t your fate; sheer chance made you and him both drive into the intersection at the same time. That’s why there are so many historians (hah, of course I would have to relate this back to history) — because events allow for so many differing interpretations. It’s incredibly dangerous when we reduce occurrences to a single cause, especially if that cause is a person or a group of people (e.g. “Homosexuals are to blame for ___!”, “The Jews are our misfortune” — if we point to the most extreme examples). Life just isn’t simple, and reductionist philosophies breed laziness and prejudice.
If we think about homophobic, racist, or other prejudiced people we know, though, we usually don’t think of them as evil masterminds. That’s because ordinary evil is rampant, and, therefore, the most destructive. I mean, how many obvious psychopaths are we going to meet in our lives? Not many. But we’re all going to meet a bunch of people who epitomize the banality of evil. Negligence is evil, too, as evidenced by characters in The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina who simply forget about their wives and/or children (Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, and Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky [Anna's brother]). We’re going to meet tons of dishonest people who may not necessarily lie outright, but who will twist the truth ever so slightly so that it still seems true but achieves some ulterior motive of theirs. We’re going to meet people who lie with their eyes and ears — as in, they refuse to see the truth, pretend not to hear what you’re saying, or purposely misinterpret what should be clear. We’ll meet people who throw themselves behind an ideology (religion, liberalism, conservatism, etc.) without thinking for themselves and considering evidence and counterevidence. And of course, we’re going to meet a bunch of people whom we’ll feel justified in calling “fake.” It’s all falsehood.
If evil is ordinary, though, so is good. The heroes we typically think of — firefighters, lifeguards, people who risk their lives to save others — are heroes because their everyday habits have added up to allow heroic action to be possible. Firefighters and lifeguards go through so much training. And when we ask heroes what made them do what they did, they can’t really pinpoint a cause (again, life isn’t cause and effect). A lot of them say something along the lines of, “It was the right thing to do, so I just did it. I didn’t really think about it.” In fact, if good deeds come with causes or effects, then they’re not really good deeds in the first place if you had to have either a motive to do them or a reward for them. If we had to figure out the reasons behind them, though, it would probably be the accumulation of good values and better habits.
And if good is ordinary, then so is love. Anna Karenina lives her life like a romance novel and chases after the kind of love that simply isn’t attainable without consequences. Being someone’s mistress seems romantic, but that kind of relationship isn’t sustainable — people will find out. The best kind of love is familial love for your children (which Anna doesn’t even exhibit), spouse, and other relatives. Sure, it doesn’t seem interesting or glamorous, but you can keep the spark alive in an ordinary, loving, and stable relationship by doing romantic things here and there.
In fact, that’s what life is all about, and that’s how the professor ended the class — we give life meaning by doing the little things, focusing on the details, and living every day right. Life is complex and messy and doesn’t fit neatly into a good story. It might sound cliched, but with two of the best psychological novels as a mirrored backdrop that reflected reality almost perfectly, it wasn’t.
My interpretation of all of this: You don’t need to know your purpose in life at this moment, but through thinking for yourself, you can find purpose. Work like Levin and be productive, because even if you don’t know the ultimate purpose you’re working toward, just the act of working and doing gives you a sense of purpose and meaning. Take responsibility for your actions, because they’re not the actions of fate or of some random innocent person whom you can easily blame. Develop the habit of sincerely doing good deeds. When hopelessness seems to overcome you, focus on the good details. A small act of kindness can turn your day around. Ordinary doesn’t have to mean boring. Look for the grace in small things.
And what better time to be thankful for life’s details than during the Thanksgiving and holiday season?