Unabashed good will toward connection and grace. This is what came to me today after reading Dostoyevsky's Dream of Ridiculous Man, which was very different from what I thought it would be when I first began it. It's been so long that I read his work that I think I'm distanced from his Christian message, or have some idea of what his writing is about that's askew, but I often listen to people talking about his work, with the intention of revisiting myself.
This short book (essay?) takes one through an elaborate dream of humanity and posits a people of boundless love before being introduced to the love of suffering as an expression of desire (a lesser love, if you will). It's an epic that begins with a man in the throes of strong suicidal ideation, and ends with his becoming a preacher full of assertions those around him find ridiculous, don't believe in as true in the same way he insists they are.
It's funny that I picked this up, because just yesterday I was writing about the way dreams can prime experience and make experience more salient, memories more alive.
The story is more powerful than I thought it was, because the spin-off questions of character and how one should live are more potent than the story itself. Shining them on my own psychology I ask myself whether I've let myself become less innocent about things because innocence is just too painful. And then also about my society. We come up with terms like virtue signaling and oversharing and do-gooder to degrade expressions of intentional connection toward some kind of goodness, see people with big kind visions as deluded and look to the ego rewards behind their motives as a default. I did this today, in my writing about inventions, woke with a small bee in my bonnet, but then finished the book.
Today I'm dressed in my nicest work clothes getting ready to hopefully close on a nice big project for which I won't be rewarded in any monetary sense outside my basic wages. But I'm excited about it, because the woman I've been working with seems lovely and has been so happy to map out visions with me. I do see my work in all its mundaneness as meaningful, but at my job like most others there's a cynical way in which one seems silly for this kind of view.
Recently two friends agreed with each other that at first that they didn't like me, because they were put off by my friendliness and suspicious of my positivity. They couldn't connect with what they thought was a facade, so it's taken time for them to really learn to hear me, especially to hear that my so-called positivity usually skews to ridiculous lengths.
I'm actually quite absurdist about things, and wrestle with myself not to look down on the weaknesses of humanity. I deal with quite a few mean people in my role, but usually they are just so tired that anything not lining up well for them feels overwhelming. Waiting five minutes for a package they ordered yesterday seems a great inconvenience in the age of Amazon, etc. I've cried at my job before, because of the venom of nasty people hopped up on angry political news who come in looking for any opening they can find. I've cried when I've really wanted to come back with a witty and devastating retort that makes them sit down in the corner, as it were. But even in that, there's the connection of my colleagues as we comfort one another and share our unique ways of managing these dangerous children.
No comments:
Post a Comment