"Great thoughts come not so much from great intelligence as from great feeling, sir."
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the environment, biopsychosocial factors, and how they affect my life. Over time, I tend to reframe the psychological or physical pains I've dealt with, reflecting on how they can be either heightened or diminished. Dostoevsky, for example, reaches interesting conclusions about the psychological depths of humans, as well as the pits we may fall intopits that could potentially become a way of living, or, as Nietzsche referred to it, the eternal recurrence. Thats a bold statement, isnt it? Because it is. In the span of a month or a year, we are exposed to an overwhelming amount of information that could fundamentally change who we are. But the conclusion also follows: the true expression of someone. For those I do not have the greatest regard for, it makes me so tiredjust thinking about deliberately opening my mind to maybe get something from what feels like a portrait of someone I used to know. Throughout my life, Ive set standards for who I want to become, and those same standards may be responsible for periodically numbing both the good and the bad emotions because I want to feel grounded by habits, to some extent. I feel like I live with some people who have fallen into one of those pitspits I recognize myself. And it's so deep that I can't offer my hand, or my flashlight only scratches the surface of a blackened oblivion. Im not someone who constantly feels obliged to offer wisdom about how to live life. Im someone who writes about my truth, speaking through examples I try to apply to my own life. It may seem selfish and absolute, but the only way out would be by keeping my distance from those I have tried endlessly to cultivate genuine trust with. Distance is necessary, because when I observe some behaviors, I feel anxiety. My associative memory pulls up bad memories from a not-so-distant past filled with constant intrusive thoughts, compulsive behavior, vanity, ego, gluttony, rage, and the feeling of being stuck in a fragmented life, desperately grasping for clarity. Dostoevsky makes me wonder about something really immoral in our nature and about living among moral demonswho, concerningly, do not feel any duty to comply with the fundamentals of societys social contract. Making my life about helping my subjective meaning of a lost soul requires a bigger strategy. More than putting out occasional fires with words, it requires, beforehand, for me to be a better human. From what I've experienced so far, Ive been greatly misunderstood and exposed to people who oversimplify most impressive things rather than engaging with them. Living among them negatively affects me as well. But again, what kind of person shuts themselves off from the world, not caring how it affects the people they coexist with? That sounds selfish and would make a fitting lower circle in Dantes modern hell. The Eternal Husband revolves around a complex relationship between the protagonists Alexei Ivanovich Velchaninov and Pavel Pavlovitch Trusotsky. Both of them make proximity by intuition and little history. The tale intensifies with a love-and-hate relationship between them, dealing with somewhat particular affairs within their ecosystem and conditions, such as the life and death of relatives, the tormented relationship of the young daughter Liza, the mischievous, inconstant, and dissociative nature of Pavel, and the recovery attempts mixed with forgiveness and acceptance from Velchaninov. Somewhere within the narrative, I found myself repeatedly questioning the angst and tension Pavel evoked in me. I know a few Pavel Pavlovitches in my lifeindividuals who, most of the time, seem incapable of reflecting deeply enough to understand the "whys" and "wheres." They justify their decisions and actions as spontaneous responses to an uncertain and amoral universe. Unsatisfied, these self-entitled revolutionarieslike the Pavel Pavlovitches I knowattempt to speak with such persuasiveness and conviction about ill-conceived ideas, only for their words to reveal themselves as hollow in the end. Being a Dostoevsky novel, he makes sure to interconnect and underline detailed emotions, the casuistry processes of reasoning and conscience. Telling whole novels of entire lifespans, whether imposed or chosen, he makes us reflect on our nature, the ways we live, and how it affects the overall scenario for as long as those characters live and die. The Russian vernacular tradition and St. Petersburg's underbelly society accumulate the pain of grief in souls like a ripe abscess, which becomes rich and alive with each Dostoevskian novel. Link to my highlights: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11mLDBrYTsMpBFZYP20hXAHA4pIZg83Ii/view?usp=sharing