Dostoevsky, Sin and Gin...

"I am a sick man. I am an angry man. I think there is something wrong with my spleen."

I envy Dostoevsky. It must have been incredible to be the first person to experience the above. How many people have read that sentence? I don't care, people can have their Dickens with "It was the best of times it was the worst of times." They can have their Tolstoy with his famous lead-off lines (look it up in Anna Karenina). They can keep their Homer with his starting in the "media ras." For my money Dostoevski's opening is the greatest in all literature.

Well, with the possible exception of "Listen, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time..."

Dostoevsky is a guy who doesn't et enought credit in this post literate world. Literature and philosophy are dead, and we are impoverished in it's absence. People try and resurrect it on PBS, the Charlie Rose show, etc. But it's no good. The Word has been consigned to a small space in a crowded boxcar where all the enemies of the current Kulture have been packed for "resettlement." Pretty soon the boxcar will come to a stop and the words will be separated into Newsprint and Other. 'Other' ofcourse will be sent to the ovens. The words will come out of the chimneys like so many memories of Elie Weisel.

We are in a post literate world, as I said. Things go fast. I won't say too fast, even though I'm thinking it. Things go at a normal speed for my kids. But who can keep up with it, and who wants to? There is a lack of reflection that has taken over the world and crowded everything that reflects - yes, onto the boxcars.

What gets me the most is that this world, this fast and unreflective world, has been created by Tom Brokaw's "greatest generation", then the Baby Boomers, the X'ers, and all sorts of people who should know better. Yet now we live in a world of George Bush, Fox News, boxcars...

The same mistakes keep happening over and over. The Holocaust, VietNam, the Killing Fields, Iraq. When will it end.

It would be nice to curl up under several blankets with THE BOOK, the stove puffing away in the center of the room, the frost on the windows making it hard to read by the outside light, but since there is no electricity, it'll have to do. If only there was money for food, or a Sonya...

"I am a sick man, I am an angry man. I think there is something wrong with my spleen."

Even the worst thoughts wax nostalgic in the absence of thoughts today.