The following passage I found striking...it comes after Dmitri describes how the Karamazov's are insects--sensual, lustful insects. Even an angel like Alyosha, he says, has this insect living somewhere inside him, ready to stir up a tempest. This secret weakness in Alyosha has been mentioned enough times in these early chapters, I will be interested to see what comes of it. So far the problem of good and evil has been framed in terms of different characters in the story, Alyosha is good / Fyodor is evil, for example. I suspect that at some point that struggle will also take place in a single character's heart...likely Alyosha.
Anyway, the passage:
Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am a cultivated man, brother, but I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s terrible what mysteries there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve them as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty! I can’t endure the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What’s still more awful is that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. Yes, man is broad, too broad, indeed. I’d have him narrower. The devil only knows what to make of it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.
We are inclined, in modern philosophy, to speak a great deal of truth, and of goodness. Dostoevsky brings into his story the ideal of beauty. What to make of this discussion of the beauty of Sodom, and the beauty of the Virgin? I don't know what to say about it. Anyway, I wish I had the time to really reflect on this passage...but at the very least I want to make note of it here and keep it in my mind as I continue reading...
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