more on Dostoyevsky... and other reflections

INCREDIBLE

"Raskolinikov had been very dreamy for a few days before.... through melancholy and fanatacism... felt as though something had fallen on him and was stifling him... Mere existence had always been too little for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was just because of the strength of his desires that he had thought himself a man to whom more was permissible than others.... Tears and agonies would at least have been life. But he did not repent of his crime... dead weight of instinct...But it was too tiresome and unbearable to go on thinking and thinking about this. When he was alone, he had not gone twenty paces before he sank, as usual, into deep thought.... a thick milky mist hung over the town....It was a dark and stifling evening. Threatening stormclouds came over the sky about ten o'clock. There was a clap of thunder, and the rain came down like a waterfall. The water fell not in drops, but beat on the earth in streams. There were flashes of lightning every minute and each flash lasted while one could count five....A strange smile contorted his face, a pitiful, sad, weak smile, a smile of despair.....There too probably there were tea tables and singing in the daytime. Now drops of rain flew in at the window from the trees and bushes; it was dark as in a cellar so that he could only just make out some dark blurs of objects... Now he's too eager for life...He was not thinking of anything and did not want to think. But one image rose after another in coherent scraps of thought without beginning or end passed through his mind. He sank into drowsiness. Perhaps the cold, or the dampness or the dark, or the wind that howled under the window and tossed the trees roused a sort of persistent craving for the fantastic... There are few places where there are so many gloomy, strong and queer influences on the soul of a man as in Petersburg."

yeah, how much I would've died to go to St. Petersburg last summer when I was a 4 hour train ride away in Finland. But alas, one day.

I connect to this so much; it's hard to explain. this book hits so many crucial themes in my life, it's unreal. Like life-- lots of heavy darkness with periods of intense super-aliveness and transcendence. beautiful, moving, bound and tied, self-destructive coping mechanisms, addiction, faith, vices. truth is almost always stranger than fiction.