“Oh, for a girl in any case there’s noth­ing so awful about it. All girls take pride in being pro­posed to.”
“All girls, yes, but not her.”
Oblon­sky smiled. He under­stood this feel­ing of Levin’s very well, he knew that for him all the girls in the world were divided into two kinds: one kind was—all the girls in the world except her, and those girls had every human frailty and were very com­mon­place girls; the other kind was—she alone, with no frail­ties at all and far beyond all mankind.
“Wait a sec­ond, you must have some of this sauce,” he said, keep­ing Levin’s hand from push­ing the sauce away.
Levin obe­di­ently helped him­self to the sauce, but did not give Oblon­sky a chance to eat.
“No, now you listen—listen!” he said. “You can under­stand that for me this is a ques­tion of life or death. I’ve never spo­ken about it to any­one. And I can’t speak about it to any­one as I can with you. You and I, after all, are com­pletely dif­fer­ent from each other in every way: dif­fer­ent tasts, opin­ions, every­thing; but I know you’re fond of me and under­stand me, and because of that I’m ter­ri­bly fond of you. But for God’s sake you must be absolutely frank!”
P 39

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Noth­ing would have seemed sim­pler than for him, a man thirty-two years old, of good fam­ily and rich rather than poor, to pro­pose to Princess Shcherbatsky; in all like­li­hood he would instantly have been acknowl­edged as a first-rate match. But Levin was in love, and because of this it seemed to him that Kitty was such per­fec­tion in every way, a being far above every­thing else on earth, while he was a lowly, earthy crea­ture, that it was absolutely unthink­able for oth­ers and her­self to regard him as wor­thy of her.

AK Pg 23

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The sec­re­tary had come in, famil­iarly def­er­en­tial, and with that cer­tain mod­est aware­ness, com­mon to all sec­re­taries, of supe­ri­or­ity to their supe­ri­ors in their knowl­edge of affairs, came over to Oblon­sky with some papers and, in the form of a ques­tion, began explain­ing some dif­fi­culty. Oblon­sky did not let him fin­ish, but ami­ably placed his hand on his sleeve:
“No, do it the way I told you to,” he said, soft­en­ing the remark with a smile, and briefly explain­ing his view of the mat­ter handed the papers back and said: “So do it that way, please.”
The embar­rassed sec­re­tary went off.
P 21

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Queeg’s com­plaints in these inter­views were about the slow­ness of decod­ing, or the rout­ing of mail, or the cor­rec­tion of pub­li­ca­tions, or a smell of cof­fee com­ing from the radio shack, or an error of a sig­nal­man in copy­ing a message–it did not much mat­ter what. Willie began to develop a deep, dull hate for Queeg. It was noth­ing like the hate he had felt against Cap­tain de Vriess. It was like the hate of a hus­band for a sick wife, a mature, solid hate, caused by an unbreak­able tie to a loath­some per­son, and exist­ing not as a self-justification, but for the rot­ten gleam of plea­sure it gave off in the con­tin­u­ing gloom.

p. 352

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The fol­low­ing is the con­clu­sion to an essay by Robert Jensen enti­tled What White Peo­ple Fear, which can be found in the Spring 2010 issue of YES! Mag­a­zine.

“My inter­est in [orga­niz­ing efforts with the work­ers defense Project…a local group that advo­cates for work-place jus­tice for immi­grant work­ers, address­ing prob­lems such as wage theft within a larger social jus­tice frame­work] flows from moral and polit­i­cal beliefs–a belief in the dig­nity of all and the strug­gle to elim­i­nate hier­ar­chy in all forms. But I would be naive or dis­hon­est if I pre­tended that was my only, or even my most pow­er­ful, motive. In the end, I have com­mit­ted to this project out of selfishness-I would like to claim my full human­ity before I check out of this world. To do that, I have to move beyond the frame­work of con­ser­v­a­tive ver­sus lib­eral and adopt a truly rad­i­cal politics.

I have a choice: I can be white–that is, I can refuse to chal­lenge white supremacy or centrality–or I can be a human being. I can rest com­fort­ably in the priv­i­leges that come with being white, or I can strug­gle to be fully human. But I can’t do both. Though the work is dif­fi­cult, the choice for those of us who are white should be easy.

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Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?, a book by Phillip K. Dick, is the inspi­ra­tion for  the acclaimed movie Blade Run­ner, although the book far sur­passes the film in rich­ness and com­plex­ity. Here are the open­ing pages:

A merry lit­tle surge of elec­tric­ity piped by auto­matic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awak­ened Rick Deckard. Surprised–it always sur­prised him to find him­self awake with­out prior notice–he rose from the bed, stood up in his mul­ti­col­ored paja­mas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again.

“You set your Pen­field too weak,” he said to her. “I’ll reset it and you’ll be awake and–”

“Keep your hand off my set­tings.” Her voice held bit­ter sharp­ness. “I don’t want to be awake.”

He seated him­self beside her, bent over her, and explained softly. “If you set the surge up high enough, you’ll be glad you’re awake; that’s the whole point. At set­ting C it over­comes the thresh­old bar­ring con­scious­ness, as it does for me.” Friendlily, because he felt well-disposed toward the world–his set­ting had been at D–he pat­ted her bare, pale shoulder.

“Get your crude cop’s hand away,” Iran said.

“I’m not a cop.” He felt irri­ta­ble, now, although he hadn’t dialed for it.

“You’re worse,” his wife said, her eyes still shut. “You’re a mur­derer hired by the cops.”

“I’ve never killed a human being in my life.” His irri­tabil­ity had risen, now; had become out­right hostility.

Iran said, “Just those poor andys.”

“I notice you’ve never had any hes­i­ta­tion as to spend­ing the bounty money I bring home on what­ever momen­tar­ily attracts your atten­tion.” He rose, strode to the con­sole of his mood organ. “Instead of sav­ing,” he said, “so we could buy a real sheep, to replace that fake elec­tric one upstairs. A mere elec­tric ani­mal. And me earn­ing all that I’ve worked my way up to through the years.” At his con­sole he hes­i­tated between dial­ing for a thal­a­mic sup­pres­sant (which would abol­ish his mood of rage) or a thal­a­mic stim­u­lant (which would make him irked enough to win the argument).

“If you dial,” Iran said, eyes open and watch­ing, “for greater venom, then I’ll dial the same. I’ll dial the max­i­mum and you’ll see a fight that makes every argu­ment we’ve had up to now seem like noth­ing. Dial and see; just try me.” She rose swiftly, loped to the con­sole of her own mood organ, stood glar­ing at him, waiting.

He sighed, defeated by her threat. “I’ll dial what’s on my sched­ule for today.” Exam­in­ing the sched­ule for Jan­u­ary 3, 1992, he saw that a busi­nesslike pro­fes­sional atti­tude was called for. “If I dial by sched­ule,” he said war­ily, “will you agree to also?” He waited, canny enough not to com­mit him­self until his wife had agreed to fol­low suit.

“My sched­ule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depres­sion,” Iran said.

“What? Why did you sched­ule that?” It defeated the whole pur­pose of the mood organ. “I didn’t even know you could set it for that,” he said gloomily.

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“I was sit­ting here one after­noon,” Iran said, “and nat­u­rally I had turned on Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends and he was talk­ing about a big news item he’s about to break and then that awful com­mer­cial came on, the one I hate.…At that moment…when I had the T sound off, I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialed it. So although I heard the empti­ness intel­lec­tu­ally, I didn’t feel it. My first reac­tion con­sisted of being grate­ful that we could afford a Pen­field mood organ. But then I real­ized how unhealthy it was, sens­ing the absense of life, not just in this build­ing but every­where, and not reacting–do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be con­sid­ered a sign of men­tal ill­ness; they called it ‘absence of appro­pri­ate affect.’ So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I exper­i­mented. And I finally found a set­ting for despair.” Her dark, pert face showed sat­is­fac­tion, as if she had achieved some­thing of worth. “So I put it on my sched­ule for twice a month; I think that’s a rea­son­able amount of time to feel hope­less about every­thing, about stay­ing here on Earth after every­body who’s smart has emi­grated, don’t you think?”

“But a mood like that,” Rick said, “you’re apt to stay in it, not dial your way out. Despair like that, about total real­ity, is self-perpetuating.”

“I pro­gram an auto­matic reset­ting for three hours later,” his wife said sleekly. “A 481. Aware­ness of the man­i­fold pos­si­bil­i­ties open to me in the future; new hope that–”

“I know 481,” he inter­rupted. He had dialed out the com­bi­na­tion many times; he relied on it greatly. “Lis­ten,” he said, seat­ing him­self on his bed and tak­ing hold of her hands to draw her down beside him, “even with an auto­matic cut­off it’s dan­ger­ous to undergo a depres­sion, any kind. For­get what you’ve sched­uled and I’ll for­get what I’ve sched­uled; we’ll dial a 104 together and both expe­ri­ence it, and then you stay in it while I reset mine for my usual busi­nesslike atti­tude. That way I’ll want to hop up to the roof and check out the sheep and then head for the office; mean­while I’ll know you’re not sit­ting her brood­ing with no TV.” He released her slim, long fin­gers, passed through the spa­cious apart­ment to the liv­ing room, which smelled faintly of last night’s cig­a­rettes. There he bent to turn on the TV.

From the bed­room Iran’s voice came. “I can’t stand TV before breakfast.”

“Dial 888,” Rick said as the set warmed. “The desire to watch TV, no mat­ter what’s on it.”

“I don’t feel like dial­ing any­thing at all now,” Iran said.

“Then dial 3,” he said.

“I can’t dial a set­ting that stim­u­lates my cere­bral cor­tex into want­ing to dial! If I don’t want to dial, I don’t want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and want­ing to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imag­ine; I just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor.” Her voice had become sharp with over­tones of bleak­ness as her soul con­gealed and she ceased to move, as the instinc­tive, omnipresent film of great weight, of an almost absolute iner­tia, set­tled over her.

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He turned up the TV sound, and the voice of Buster Friendly boomed out and filled the room. “–ho ho, folks. Time now for a brief note on today’s weather. The Mon­goose satel­lite reports that fall­out will be espe­cially pro­nounced toward noon and will then taper off, so all you folks who’ll be ven­tur­ing out–”

Appear­ing beside him, her long night­gown trail­ing wispily, Iran shut off the TV set. “Okay, I give up; I’ll dial. Any­thing you want me to be: ecsta­tic sex­ual bliss–I feel so bad I’ll even endure that. What the hell. What dif­fer­ence does it make?”

“I’ll dial for both of us,” Rick said, and led her back into the bed­room. There, at her con­sole, he dialed 594; pleased acknowl­edg­ment of husband’s supe­rior wis­dom in all mat­ters. On his own con­sole he dialed for a cre­ative and fresh atti­tude toward his job, although this he hardly needed; such was his habit­ual, innate approach with­out recourse to Pen­field arti­fi­cial brain stimulation.

pgs. 1–7

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Hous­to­ni­ans,

It is very impor­tant to the City of Hous­ton that we have a com­plete and accu­rate count for the 2010 Census. We lose an esti­mated $1,700 per per­son per year for every­one not counted. Please be on the look­out for the Cen­sus form when it arrives in March, fill it out imme­di­ately and mail it back immediately. Please ask your friends and neigh­bors to do the same. Thank you in advance for your participation.

Annise D. Parker

Mayor

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In the The Mam­moth Book of Eye-Witness His­tory by Jon E. Lewis, the Arab trav­eler Ibn Fad­lan describes what he saw of a Swedish Viking’s funeral in the tenth century:

One day I learnt that one of their chief­tains had died. He was placed apart in a grave which was cov­ered over for ten days until cloth­ing for him had been cut out and stitched. If the dead man were poor, a small boat was made, in which the corpse was placed and then burnt. But if he were wealthy, his prop­erty and goods were divided into three por­tions: one for his fam­ily, another to meet the cost of his cloth­ing, the third to make nabid (funeral beer) which was drunk on the day when the dead man’s slave was burnt with him…

When one of their chiefs died, his fam­ily demanded of his men and women slaves: ‘Which among you wish to die with him?’ Then, one of them would say, ‘I will’, and who­ever said that would be forced to undergo it, it was not pos­si­ble to with­draw. If she wished to do so, it would not be allowed. Those who vol­un­teered were nearly always female slaves.

So it was that when this man died, the slaves were asked: ‘Which among you wishes to die with him?’ One of the female slaves replied: ‘I will’. From that moment she would be under con­stant guard by two other ser­vants who took care of her to the extent of wash­ing her feet with their own hands. Prepa­ra­tions were made for the dead man, his cloth­ing made etc., while every day the con­demned girl would drink and sing, as though in prepa­ra­tion for a joy­ous event. When the day arrived for the chief and his slave to be burnt, I went to the river where his boat was moored. It had been hoisted up on to the bank. Then there were placed around it some­thing which looked like a great scaf­fold­ing of wood…

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Peo­ple began to walk around it speak­ing in a tongue unknown to me, but the corpse was lying all the time in his grave; they never dis­turbed it again. They then brought a bier, placed it on the boat, and cov­ered it over with car­pets and cush­ions of dibag (bro­caded silk) from Byzan­tium. Then there arrived an old woman whom they called the ‘Angel of Death’, and she it was who spread the cush­ions on the bier. She, too, was in charge of the whole cer­e­mony, from the dress­ing of the cadaver to the exe­cu­tion of the slave.

I noticed that the Angel of Death was a strap­ping woman, mas­sively built and aus­tere of coun­te­nance. When they arrived at the grave the earth was removed from the wooden lid and then the wood itself was taken away. Next the corpse was stripped of the gar­ments in which he had died. I noticed that his body had turned black from the intense cold.

When they had placed the body in the grave, they had also put there beer, fruit and a lute, all things which they now took away. Most sur­pris­ingly, the corpse has not changed at all save for the colour of his flesh. They took a pride in their duty of cloth­ing him in draw­ers, trousers, boots, a tunic and cloak of dibag embell­ished with gold but­tons: the corpse was then given a cap of dibag and sable; then he was car­ried to a tent set over the boat Nabid, fruits and aro­matic herbs were then brought and placed all around his body; they also brought bread, meat and onions which they threw down before him.

That done, they took a dog and, after cut­ting it in two, they threw the pieces into the ship. After­wards they brought all his weapons and laid them by his side. Then they took two horses, drove them until they sweated, and then cut them in pieces with swords and threw their flesh into the boat; the same was done with two cows. Next they killed a cock and a hen and threw them in too.

Mean­while, the slave who had vol­un­teered to be killed went hither and thither, enter­ing each tent in turn, and the mas­ter of each house­hold had sex­ual inter­course with her, say­ing, ‘Tell your mas­ter that I do this thing for the love of him.’ [My bold-facing.]

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When Fri­day after­noon came, they led the slave girl to some­thing they had made which resem­bled a door frame. Then she mounted onto the palms of men’s hands high enough to look down over the frame­work, and when they low­ered her again she said some­thing in a strange tongue. They lifted her up again and she behaved exactly as before. They low­ered her again, then once more raised her up and she repeated what she had done the first and sec­ond times. Then they gave her a hen; she cut off its head and threw it away; they took the hen and threw it into the boat.

I asked my inter­preter what she had said. He replied: ‘The first time she was lifted up, she said: “look, I see my father and mother!” The sec­ond time: “Behold, I see my dead rel­a­tives seated around.” The third time, she had said: “Behold! I see my mas­ter in Par­adise, and Par­adise is green and fair, and with him are men and young boys. He is call­ing me. Let me go to him!”

Then they led her towards the ship. Next she took off two bracelets she was wear­ing and gave them to the old woman, the Angel of Death, who was going to kill her. She then took off the two finger-rings she was wear­ing and gave them to the daugh­ters of the Angel of Death.

Then they raised her on to the ship, but they did not let her enter the tent. After that many men came with wooden shields and she was given a beaker of nabid. She sand as she drank it. My inter­preter told me then: ‘It is thus that she bids farewell to her friends.’ Then she was given a sec­ond cup. She took it and sang for a long time: but the old woman told her to make haste, to drink up and go into the tent where she would find her mas­ter. I looked at her at that moment and she seemed com­pletely bewil­dered. She wanted to enter the tent but only man­aged to put her head between it and the ship. The old woman took hold of her head and made her enter the tent, fol­low­ing her in.

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Then it was that the men began to beat their shields with wooden sticks, to sti­fle the cries of the slave girl, so that other girls would not take fright and refuse to die with their mas­ters. Six men then entered the tent and all had sex­ual inter­course with her. Then they made her lie at the side of her dead mas­ter. Two held her hands and two her feet, and the Angel of Death wound a noose round her neck end­ing in a knot at both ends which she placed in the hands of two men, for them to pull. She then advanced with a broad-bladed dag­ger which she plunged repeat­edly between the ribs of the girl while the men stran­gled her until she was dead.

Then the clos­est rel­a­tive of the dead man came. He seized a piece of wood and started a fire. In this fash­ion was set alight the wood which had been piled under the ship after the dead slave girl had been placed beside her mas­ter. Finally, peo­ple came with kin­dling and fire­wood; each man car­ried a fire­brand which he threw upon the wood-pile, so that the wood was engulfed in flames, then the ship, the tent and the man, the slave and every­thing in it.

The Mam­moth Book of Eye-Witness His­tory, edited by Jon E. Lewis

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These two quotes are from The Mam­moth Book of Eye-Witness His­to­ries, edited by Jon E. Lewis. They are both trans­la­tions from the orig­i­nal texts:

A Schoolboy’s Day, Sumer, c. 2000 BC

Anony­mous

[The Sume­ri­ans of Mesopotamia (now Iraq), built the first cities, the first state. They invented writ­ing and the for­mal edu­ca­tion of children.]

Arriv­ing at school in the morn­ing I recited my tablet, ate my lunch, pre­pared my new tablet, wrote it, fin­ished it, then they assigned me my oral work…When school was dis­missed, I went home, entered the house, and found my father sit­ting there. I told my father of my writ­ten work, then recited my tablet to him, and my father was delighted.

p.6

Hunt­ing Croc­o­diles, Egypt, c. 450 BC

Herodotus

Some of the Egyp­tians hold the croc­o­dile as sacred, but oth­ers do not, and hunt it as an enemy. Those that live in the neigh­borhour­hood of Thebes and the lake of Moeris con­sider it to be extremely sacred. Each com­mu­nity rears one croc­o­dile which is trained to come to hand; they put glass and gold orna­ments on its ears and bracelets on its front feet, giv­ing it spe­cial food and divine offer­ings, and treat­ing it extremely well as long as it lives. On its death it is embalmed and placed in sacred coffins. But the inhab­i­tants of the city of Ele­phan­tine do not think of them as sacred, and even eat them…

p. 7

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The fol­low­ing are excerpts from The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov, Book 1, by Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky, the ver­sion trans­lated by Con­stance Garnett:

At the same time, he was all his life one of the most sense­less, fan­tas­ti­cal fel­lows in the whole dis­trict. I repeat, it was not stupiditiy—the major­ity of these fan­tas­ti­cal fel­lows are shrewd and intel­li­gent enough—but just sense­less­ness, and a pecu­liar national form of it.

p 3

I knew a young lady of the last “roman­tic” gen­er­a­tion who after some years of an enig­matic pas­sion for a gen­tle­man, whom she might quite eas­ily have mar­ried at any moment, invented insu­per­a­ble obsta­cles to their union, and ended by throw­ing her­self one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid river from a high bank, almost a precipice, and so per­ished, entirely to sat­isfy her own caprice, and to be like Shakespeare’s Ophe­lia. Indeed, if this precipice, a cho­sen and favourite spot of hers, had been less pic­turesque, if there had been a pro­saic flat bank in its place, most likely the sui­cide would never have taken place. This is a fact.… Ade­laida Ivanovna Misuov’s action was sim­i­larly, no doubt, an echo of other people’s ideas, and was due to the irri­ta­tion caused by lack of men­tal free­dom. She wanted, per­haps, to show her fem­i­nine inde­pen­dence, to over­ride class dis­tinc­tions and the despo­tism of her family.

p 3–4

Imme­di­ately Fyo­dor Pavlovitch intro­duced a reg­u­lar harem into the house, and aban­doned him­self to orgies of drunk­en­ness. In the inter­vals he used to drive all over the province, com­plain­ing tear­fully to each and all of Ade­laida Ivanona’s hav­ing left him, going into details too dis­grace­ful for a hus­band to men­tion in regard to his own mar­ried life. What seemed to grat­ify him and flat­ter his self-love most was to play the ridicu­lous part of the injured hus­band, and to parade his woes with embellishments.

p 5

One would think that you’d got a pro­mo­tion, Fyo­dor Pavlovitch, you seem so pleased in spite of your sor­row,” scoffers said to him. Many even added that he was glad of a new comic part in which to play the buf­foon, and that it was sim­ply to make it fun­nier that he pre­tended to be unaware of his ludi­crous posi­tion. But, who knows, it may have been sim­plic­ity. At last he suc­ceeded in get­ting on the track of his run­away wife. The poor woman turned out to be in Peters­burg, where she had gone with her divin­ity stu­dent, and where she had thrown her­self into a life of com­plete eman­ci­pa­tion. Fyo­dor Pavlovitch at once began bustling about, mak­ing prepa­ra­tions to go to Peters­burg, with what object he could not him­self have said. He would per­haps have really gone; but hav­ing deter­mined to do so he felt at once enti­tled to for­tify him­self for the jour­ney by another bout of reck­less drink­ing. And just at that time his wife’s fam­ily received the news of her death in Peters­burg. She had died quite sud­denly in a gar­ret, accord­ing to one story, of typhus, or as another ver­sion had it, of star­va­tion. Fyo­dor PAvlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife’s death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shout­ing with joy, rais­ing his hands to Heaven: “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy ser­vant depart in peace,” but oth­ers say he wept with­out restraint like a lit­tle child, so much so that peo­ple were sorry for him, in spite of the repul­sion he inspired. It is quite pos­si­ble that both ver­sions were true, that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him. As a gen­eral rule, peo­ple, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we sup­pose. And we our­selves are, too.

p 5

He com­pletely aban­doned the child of his mar­riage with Ade­laida Ivanovna, not from mal­ice, nor because of his mat­ri­mo­nial griev­ances, but sim­ply because he for­got him.

p 6

Fyo­dor Pavlovitch was all his life fond of act­ing, of sud­denly play­ing an unex­pected part, some­times with­out any motive for doing so, and even to his own direct dis­ad­van­tage.…

(My ital­ics) p 7

I won’t enlarge upon that now, as I shall have much to tell later of Fyo­dor Pavlovitch’s first­born, and must con­fine myself now to the most essen­tial facts about him, with­out which I could not begin my story.

p 7

Though Fyo­dor Pavlovitch was a drunk­ard and a vicious debauchee he never neglected invest­ing his cap­i­tal, and man­aged his busi­ness affairs very suc­cess­fully, though, no doubt, over scrupu­lously. Sofya Ivanovna was the daugh­ter of an obscure dea­con, and was left from child­hood an orphan with­out rela­tions. She grew up in the house of a general’s widow, a wealthy old lady of good posi­tion, who was at once her bene­fac­tress and tor­men­tor. I do not know the details, but I have only heard that the orphan girl, a meek and gen­tle crea­ture, was once cut down from a hal­ter in which she was hang­ing from a nail in the loft, so ter­ri­ble were her suf­fer­ings from the caprice and ever­last­ing nag­ging of this old woman, who was appar­ently not bad-hearted but had become an insuf­fer­able tyrant through idleness.

p 9

[Alyosha] was sim­ply an early lover of human­ity, and that he adopted the monas­tic life was sim­ply because at that time it struck him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul strug­gling from the dark­ness of worldly wicked­ness to the light of love. And the rea­son this life struck him in this way was that he found in it at that time, as he thought, an extra­or­di­nary being, our cel­e­brated elder, Zos­sima, to whom he became attached with all the warm first love of his ardent heart. But I do not dis­pute that he was very strange even at that time, and had been so indeed from his cradle.…But he rarely cared to speak of this mem­ory to any one. In his child­hood and youth he was by no means expan­sive, and talked lit­tle indeed, but not from shy­ness or a sullen unso­cia­bil­ity; quite the con­trary, from some­thing dif­fer­ent, from a sort of inner pre­oc­cu­pa­tion entirely per­sonal and uncon­cerned with other peo­ple, but so impor­tant to him that he seemed, as it were, to for­get oth­ers on account of it. But he was fond of peo­ple: he seemed through­out his life to put implicit trust in peo­ple: yet no one ever looked on him as a sim­ple­ton or a naive per­son. There was some­thing about him which made one feel at once (and it was so all his life after­wards) that he did not care to be a judge of others–that he would never take it upon him­self to crit­i­cize and would never con­demn any one for any­thing. He seemed, indeed, to accept every­thing with­out the least con­dem­na­tion though often griev­ing bit­terly: and this was so much so that no one could sur­prise or frighten him even in his ear­li­est youth.

p 15

[Alyosha] had one char­ac­ter­is­tic which made all his schoolfel­lows from the bot­tom class to the top want to mock at him, not from mal­ice but because it amused them. This char­ac­ter­is­tic was a wild fanat­i­cal mod­esty and chastity. He could not bear to hear cer­tain words and cer­tain con­ver­sa­tions about women. There are “cer­tain” words and con­ver­sa­tions unhap­pily impos­si­ble to erad­i­cate in schools. Boys pure in mind and heart, almost chil­dren, are fond of talk­ing in school among them­selves, and even aloud, of things, pic­tures, and images of which even sol­diers would some­times hes­i­tate to speak. More than that, much that sol­diers have no knowl­edge or con­cep­tion of is famil­iar to quite young chil­dren of our intel­lec­tual and higher classes. There is no moral deprav­ity, no real cor­rupt inner cyn­i­cism in it, but there is the appear­ance of it, and it is often looked upon among them as some­thing refined, sub­tle, dar­ing, and wor­thy of imi­ta­tion. See­ing that Alyosha…put his fin­gers in his ears when they talked of “that,” they used some­times to crowd round him, pull his hands away, and shout nas­ti­ness into both ears, while he strug­gled, slipped to the floor, tried to hide him­self with­out utter­ing one word of abuse, endur­ing their insults in silence. But at last they left him alone and gave up taunt­ing him with being a “reg­u­lar girl,” and what’s more they looked upon it with com­pas­sion as a weak­ness. He was always one of the best in the class but was never first.

pg 16–17

Besides, it will be more seemly for you with the harlots…though you’re like an angel, noth­ing touches you. And I dare­say noth­ing will touch you there. That’s why I let you go, because I hope for that. You’ve got all your wits about you. You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again. And I will wait for you. I feel that you’re the only crea­ture in the world who has not con­demned me. My dear boy, I feel it, you know. I can’t help feel­ing it.”

p 21

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