Here's a thread, should anyone want to use it, for the distribution of favorite passages from our reading -- stories, poems, memoirs, histories, whatever. The only criterion for inclusion is that the passage really is a favorite of the person who posts it. The person posting it can talk about it or not. The source can be given or withheld. Discussion of the passage by others is appropriate, but if one has nothing to say about it other than an expression of indifference, perhaps that need not be posted.

Posted below is a passage from The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. The translation is an old one in the public domain at Project Gutenberg. I have made one change, substituting one word for two in the translation. The translation I love and recommend is the Pevear and Volokhonsky one published around 30 years ago.

Alyosha Karamazov is a young man who thought he would become a Russian Orthodox monk, but his loving spiritual advisor told him to leave the monastery and go into the world. This elder has just died. Alyosha and many other people thought that a miracle might occur, that the elder's body would not decay and instead would exude a wonderful fragrance. To their great disappointment, the body has begun to decay and smells bad. Alyosha fell into a dream while present for the long funeral service....

[The passage}

Something glowed in Alyosha’s heart, something filled it till it ached,
tears of rapture rose from his soul.... He stretched out his hands,
uttered a cry and waked up.

Again the coffin, the open window, and the soft, solemn, distinct
reading of the Gospel. But Alyosha did not listen to the reading. It
was strange, he had fallen asleep on his knees, but now he was on his
feet, and suddenly, as though thrown forward, with three firm rapid
steps he went right up to the coffin. His shoulder brushed against
Father Païssy without his noticing it. Father Païssy raised his eyes
for an instant from his book, but looked away again at once, seeing
that something strange was happening to the boy. Alyosha gazed for half
a minute at the coffin, at the covered, motionless dead man that lay in
the coffin, with the ikon on his breast and the peaked cap with the
octangular cross, on his head. He had only just been hearing his voice,
and that voice was still ringing in his ears. He was listening, still
expecting other words, but suddenly he turned sharply and went out of
the cell.

He did not stop on the steps either, but went quickly down; his soul,
overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness. The
vault of heaven, full of soft, shining stars, stretched vast and
fathomless above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from the
zenith to the horizon. The fresh, motionless, still night enfolded the
earth. The white towers and golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out
against the sapphire sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the beds
round the house, were slumbering till morning. The silence of earth
seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth
was one with the mystery of the stars....

Alyosha stood, gazed, and suddenly threw himself down on the earth. He
did not know why he embraced it. He could not have told why he longed
so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss it all. But he kissed it weeping,
sobbing and watering it with his tears, and vowed passionately to love
it, to love it for ever and ever. “Water the earth with the tears of
your joy and love those tears,” echoed in his soul.

What was he weeping over?

Oh! in his rapture he was weeping even over those stars, which were
shining to him from the abyss of space, and “he was not ashamed of that
ecstasy.” There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds
of God, linking his soul to them, and it was trembling all over “in
contact with other worlds.” He longed to forgive every one and for
everything, and to beg forgiveness. Oh, not for himself, but for all
men, for all and for everything. “And others are praying for me too,”
echoed again in his soul. But with every instant he felt clearly and,
as it were, tangibly, that something firm and unshakable as that vault
of heaven had entered into his soul. It was as though some idea had
seized the sovereignty of his mind—and it was for all his life and for
ever and ever. He had fallen on the earth a weak boy, but he rose up a
fighter, and he knew and felt it suddenly at the very moment
of his ecstasy. And never, never, all his life long, could Alyosha
forget that minute.

“Some one visited my soul in that hour,” he used to say afterwards,
with implicit faith in his words.

Within three days he left the monastery in accordance with the words of
his elder, who had bidden him “sojourn in the world.”



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 25 Aug 21 | 12:36PM by Dale Nelson.