matching tracksuits

I’ve been reading Anna Karenina intermittently for a couple of weeks now, and I find it somewhat difficult to sympathize with such characters who are so clearly in an entirely different social world than I. They talk of Society (with the ever-important “S”) and take off abroad on a whim. Hard work for the men is listening to petitioners in their civil service job or riding around their estate to make sure all the serfs are working as directed (maybe occasionally working with them!); had work for the women is dealing with servants’ incompetence. It’s not difficult to see why Marxist ideology took root there as it did, and it’s strikingly evident already in Tolstoy’s mid—19th century Russia. One character even semi-accurately predicts that Marxism will be the new theology, sweeping Christianity off to one side.

And just when you think none of the characters is going to address any of this, Oblonsky, Levin, and Veslovsky head off into the marshes for a couple of days of shooting. Sitting in a peasant’s hut, enjoying his hospitality, they begin talking about the justness of social system when their host must step outside for a while.

“Why do we eat and drink, go shooting and do no work, while he is always, always working?” said Vasenka Veslovsky, evidently for the first time in his life thinking of this, and therefore speaking quite genuinely (582).

Why indeed? Because you can afford it.

The conversation ends with an exchange between Oblonsky and Levin, in which the former admits the inherent injustice in the system, but encourages Levin to accept them nonetheless.

“One of two things: either you confess that the existing order of Society is just, and then uphold your rights; or else own that you are enjoying unfair privileges, as I do, and take them with pleasure.”

“No! If it were unjust, you could not use such advantages with pleasure; at any rate I could not. The chief thing for me is, not to feel guilty” (583).

It reminds me of a similar emotion I experienced a few years ago in Berlin viewing an exhibition of Gauguin’s work:

While at the new National Gallery I was struck with a terrible sense of the stupid futility of all that I was seeing around me. Here we were, the privileged ten or fifteen percent of the world’s population, paying fifteen marks to look at some paintings (created by someone who was, by his own admission, trying to escape reality) while the remaining eighty-five percent of the world’s population is fighting for survival. We spend so much of our time trying to inject some kind of meaning in our lives while they simply try to live. The significance of the Expressionist movement or the impact of Bach’s music on his contemporaries seems pitifully  insignificant when others go to bed hungry every night. Their suffering robbed me of any pleasure I might otherwise have experienced at the gallery. And then I turned this critical light on my own aspirations and once again felt that I would be wasting my life by devoting my time and energy to studying and teaching religion and philosophy. What does it matter whether Berkley is right or wrong about the relationship between perception and existence when people are starving and disease ridden? It’s a simply matter of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — most people don’t get the most basic needs fulfilled while we in the western world scurry about trying to find meaning in paintings and music.

Perhaps Gauguin just doesn’t appeal to me . . .

Last night I began reading Oskar i Pani Róza, which is originally Oscar et la dame rose (Amazon.com) and in English would be Oscar and Ms. Rose. It’s about a ten-year-old dying of cancer and a volunteer he makes friends with, named Ms. Rose. When Ms. Rose suggests that Oskar write to God, he replies that he doesn’t believe in God. She suggests that perhaps he should write anyway:

“Maybe you would feel less lonely?”
“Less lonely with someone who doesn’t exist?”
“Why not check if he exists?”
She bent down close to me and said, “Every time you believe in him, he’ll exist a little more” (15, my translation).

Believing in something makes it more real? Is that what she’s saying? Of course, it is, and of course, it’s true. Does that mean that God exists only in our heads, that we create him by believing in him? Not quite, I think, but strangely enough, taking a leap of faith and just believing seems to make it more believable.

Czeslaw Milosz wrote in The Captive Mind (Amazon.com),

The Catholic Church wisely recognized that faith is more a matter of collective suggestion than of individual conviction. Collective religious ceremonies induce a state of belief. Folding one’s hands in prayer, kneeling, singing hymns precede faith, for faith is a psycho-physical and not simply a psychological phenomenon.

Doing leads to believing. Believing is, in a sense, encapsulated in this “doing,” and so paradoxically, as Ms. Rose seems to be saying, believing leads to believing.

This is also the question in Life of Pi, though much more directly than in Oskar. I remember the quote, something like “If you stumble at believability, what is there left to live for?” Or something like that.

I was making a sandwich or something last night – perhaps pouring a brandy, I can’t remember – and I thought, “It would indeed be nice to believe in something out there, something bigger than us that we can count on to help us when we need it.”

The trouble with that is simply that I don’t see help where help is most needed – in the suffering of a child: the painful and incomprehensible suffering that child might have to endure before dying, and that’s the “problem of evil” as I frame it. Not just any evil – incomprehensible evil.

All evil can be understood on some level by adults.

Incomprehensible evil is that which attacks children, like children in Rwanda who were hacked to death with a machete because of their ethnicity when the notion of “ethnicity” is so foreign to them that it would be difficult to explain it to them.