la condition humaine

Much to the vexation of Jane et al., I have been quite immersed in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment." There seems to be a strange delight in reading it again for me, especially in the height of winter when I feel a silly yet distant affinity with Dostoevsky who wrote the novel after his return from exile in Siberia. I imagine that like my hands that will not warm even as I hold and flip the worn, old pages, his icy hands would forever bear the residue of the Siberian winters as they wrote.

I imagine too, Raskolnikov, in all his arresting intellectual arrogance holding a guitar and singing about the "sin to know and feel too much within." I think of Sonia Marmeladov, "who lay down down on the bed with her face to the wall; ...and her body ...shuddering..." and men who sing ballads of women who beg them to keep them from the foggy dew.

If after all this, I needed to reinforce the certitude of fallen condition of humans, tomorrow night I will see "The Countess" about Ruskin, John Millias and Effie Gray. I can't help thinking of the ironic juxtaposition of the pre-raphaelites' microcosm of utopian ideals on pristine white canvases with the muddled palettes of their actual lives.