The Meditator (or The Contemplator) by Ivan Kramskoy, 1876
In The Brothers Karamazov (Bk 3, Ch 6), Dostoevsky makes reference to the above painting in describing Smerdyakov:
Yet he would sometimes stop in the house, or else in the yard or the street, fall into thought, and stand like that even for ten minutes. A physiognomist, studying him, would have said that his face showed neither thought nor reflection, but just some sort of contemplation. The painter Kramskoy has a remarkable painting entitled The Contemplator: it depicts a forest winter, and in the forest, standing all by himself on the road, in deepest solitude, a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan, and bast shoes; he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is “contemplating” something. If you nudged him, he would give a start and look at you as if he had just woken up, but without understanding anything. It’s true that he would come to himself at once, and yet, if he were asked what he had been thinking about while standing there, he would most likely not remember, but would most likely keep hidden away in himself the impression he had been under while contemplating. These impressions are dear to him, and he is most likely storing them up imperceptibly and even without realizing it—why and what for, of course, he does not know either…
Because I once was an agnostic who thought he was a realist, this caught my attention (emphasis added):
It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact. And even if he does admit it, he will admit it as a fact of nature that was previously unknown to him. In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must also allow for miracles. The Apostle Thomas declared that he would not believe until he saw, and when he saw, he said: “My Lord and my God!” Was it a miracle that made him believe? Most likely not, but he believed first and foremost because he [chose] to believe, and maybe already fully believed in his secret heart even as he was saying: “I will not believe until I see.”
— spoken by The Author in The Brothers Karamazov, Bk 1, Ch 5, “Elders”
It’s not a coincidence that my confirmation saint is Saint Thomas the Apostle. (Should have waited till the 3rd to post this.)
◊ First Martyrs of the Church of Rome, pray for us
There are several books of fiction on the edge my radar that I may someday read. Most of these books have been repeatedly mentioned in various blogs over the years that seemed good based on comments and reviews. I’m very picky about what I read, especially fiction. I finally read one these books last month, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. I was pleasantly surprised that it was better than what many of the reviews lead me to believe. I highly recommend it. (Sorry, no review.)
Another such book that has been highly recommended by many people is The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I’ve had the book in my hands several times at the bookstore, but 800+ pages seemed daunting. I thought I had a decent attention span, but this might be pushing it. Lately, I have been a little sporadic by reading a lot of short stories and books with page counts less than 250. Eight hundred pages is a commitment.
Well, after some research I settled on a translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky and bought a copy of BK. (See this comparison of a couple translations.) I figure if I can read about 150 pages per week, I can get it done before school starts in mid August. But then again, there is no hurry. The thing to remember is to enjoy and be in the process.
Say “death” and the whole room freezes—
even the couches stop moving,
even the lamps.
Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.
Say the word continuously,
and things begin to go forward.
Your life takes on
the jerky texture of an old film strip.
Continue saying it, hold it moment after moment inside the mouth,
it becomes another syllable.
A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.
Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
each swallows and swallows the world.
The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.
(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)
I need to unpack the meaning of the words of one sentence from this post:
[G]race is the Holy Spirit Himself acting in our lives.
Grace is not an object, not something that is collected or possessed, not an add-on, not I-It. It is not analogous to a magic spell from God that suddenly helps you see the right thing to do. Grace is a relationship with a subject, a Person, with Reality, I-Thou (and I am the thou to God’s I Am). What I might label as grace is a recognizing of this relationship, an awareness of being open to God and to that moment of Reality.
The choice is always there, to accept or not. Holy Spirit, help me never to say “no” to You.(I have been told that this is a dangerous prayer.)
