The concern is appreciated, but don't worry, me binge reading Dostoevsky is not (at least in this case) a cry for help. After all, if I bought「The Gambler and Other Stories」(read more here) then you can sure as hell bet (haha) that I'll be reading the "other stories" as well. It's simple economics.

So let's talk about the Ridiculous Man. For the unfamiliar,「The Dream of a Ridiculous Man」is a short story following the suicide attempt of a man who has lost purpose, or at least that is the premise. I went in blind and as I read, was very much reminded of「The Brothers Karamazov」insofar as the two works have considerable thematic overlap.

The moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all.^[1]

​

- Elder Zosima

In some ways,「The Dream of a Ridiculous Man」can be read as a self-contained exposition that distills what would eventually become the philosophy of Zosima (and to an extent Alexei) in「The Brothers Karamazov」. We see the same sense of mutual responsibility. We see the same assertion of love as the only antidote to evil. And the two works also share another thread -​- namely, how easily we can fall into an insincere life.

In「The Brothers Karamazov」, Ivan argues that anything goes, yet he is horrified when this philosophy is taken to heart by Smerdyakov. To be clear, the actual basis for Ivan's view is compelling. It is entirely coherent. But it is also entirely unlivable. The Ridiculous Man repeatedly affirms the world's meaninglessness and inconsequence. But he is still saddled with pity for the child whose mother is dying. It seems no matter how much he manages to convince himself, he can't embrace the thesis that truly nothing matters in practice. We can, and very often may, find ourselves with perfectly consistent views on life that are also dishonest.

I've been the Ridiculous Man. In the past, nihilism left me contemplating biting the very same bullet as him. And the very same unresolvable discrepancies are what stopped me. It is truly bizarre: to so wholly think (and believe) that nothing matters, and to then also feel otherwise. It is easy to find virtue in trusting nothing beyond reason and science. But then why must these tactics be privileged as the be-all and end-all of knowledge? For me, pure rationalism and pure physical reductionism have led me to a host of persuasive but incongruous metaphysics. I'm not advocating for reason and science to be discarded, but in his dream, the Ridiculous Man does seem to hold "science" as some false prophet. The point, I believe, is that it's easy to forget that formal logic is incomplete, that physics is a model, and that these systems cannot perfectly correspond with reality. Ironically, I'm reminded of「On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense」. We sometimes vest truth in approximations and forget that they are approximating. These staples of modern knowledge aren't inherently bad, as a matter of fact, they're some of the most useful frameworks for understanding we have at our disposal. But their limitations slip from our minds as a result of how powerful they are. Yet it is in those very limitations that their arbitration cannot be taken as final law.

As it turns out, with only these two tools, nihilism is hard to dismiss. To be fair, it's hard to dismiss with other tools as well. But Dostoevsky nonetheless thinks it must be dismissed because it is insincere. And if reason and science can't support this refutation (Dostoevsky actually seems to think they engender nihilism), then something else must. "I have seen [truth] with my own eyes, I have seen it in all its glory!"^[2] the Ridiculous Man proclaims, espousing the joy in a world without sin, the cancerous nature of human corruption, and the desperate societal need for love. To Dostoevsky, this is real truth. Yet he makes a structural choice for it to be heralded by a ridiculous man, based on a dream, and all conveyed through story. It is certainly hard to imagine that this is incidental. Rather, Dostoevsky seems to be trusting that his story will resonate and, in doing so, lend credence to knowledge structures separate from the ones that now hold popular cachet. The reason why「The Brothers Karamazov」and「The Dream of a Ridiculous Man」work so well, why Alexei doesn't come off as a flimsy foil to Ivan, why the Ridiculous Man does not recite a mathematical proof, why Dostoevsky writes a tale instead of a treatise is exactly because a refutation of nihilism demands it.

Now, Dostoevsky was a Christian, and sees Christianity as the antidote to a meaningless and/or broken world. This is overt in both stories discussed here. And while the extent to which any person might be persuaded of the epistemological value of Christian faith will vary, I do think there is a genuine gap in the capabilities of reason and science that Dostoevsky is pointing toward. And in light of that gap, it's important not to categorically subordinate life to reason and science. Now do I have a satisfactory answer for what you should use to augment these tools? No, unfortunately not. And to be honest, there could very well fail to be any source of knowledge that we can access that is free of shortcoming (or who knows, knowledge itself could even somehow just be structurally incapable of cleanly closing itself^[3]). Ultimately, what we're told by this man's dream is that the means we have for uncovering truth, especially truth of metaphysical weight, are imperfect. And that is a fact we may just have to live and die with.

• books
• Dostoevsky
• ethos

Decided to go through old photos and collected some of the ones I thought looked nice :)

Okay, slight lie, I took this one just recently:

This one I found comedic, mostly from the context. I recall thinking I was really cooking back in high school with the photo's composition:

What can I say, I think I fancied myself an auteur lol. The rest of the photos are here.

• photography

Writing is a masochistic endeavor, at least, for me it is. Words don't come easy. Sentences are wrought in fire. Like any craft, I suppose, it takes toil. To spill words onto a page -​- that is, to simply make noise -​- is effortless. The strife, the pain (as one Michelangelo might conceive it) is in drawing the statue out of raw marble. It is in drawing the statue out with blood, and in finding it malformed. Melodramatic, perhaps. But the point stands. It is labor to write.

Words are a tricky medium (just ask Nietzsche) for expression relies on fidelity, and words lie. In this sense, the pursuit is doomed from the start. But don't let this convince you that it is doomed only at the start. There is also endless struggle in originality and authenticity -​- speaking with your own voice. Sentences are drafted, reread. Oh, the horror of rereading. To see in your words the markings of cheap imitation! To break tone: we're Bumblebee from the Transformers. We speak by splicing and mangling the words of others, words that, to begin with, misguide. And Frankenstein loathes his monster. But I'm cursed to need to write.

It might be a compliment to tell myself that something I wrote reads like Kafka, Dostoevsky, Didion, or Proust. It would also be delirium to tell myself this, but it matters not. At best I try and fail. My voice is trite contrivance. I read in hopes of glimpsing what makes writing great. Good artists copy; great artists steal. I can do neither and am worse off for it. To quote a wise man: "Fuck."

• notes

Gambling is an unfortunate vice, a vice in which I unfortunately partake. Dostoevsky's「The Gambler」is, by no means, his greatest work. But it is also by no means shabby, especially given the circumstances under which it was written^[1].

Although I might not broadly recommend the story (insofar as there is better Dostoevsky to be read), it certainly manages to capture the air of what makes gambling so grossly engrossing. In my opinion, the book very honestly portrays the numb detachment from actual money that permeates the deepest depths of degeneracy, where the joy (if you can call it joy) is in the very act of staking and raking in chips. You're in it for the love of the game. To some extent, even in loss, there's a sense of satisfaction stemming from sheer scale. And the faithful embodiment of the physical response to pathological gambling in Grandmother and Alexei adds a visceral quality to an already grotesque story.

And maybe I don't give Dostoevsky credit where it's due. I did think there was excellent parallelism between Grandmother and Alexey's arcs (meteoric success, subsequent downfall) wherein Alexey's ultimate fate is revealed, not just by Astley, but by the third act of Grandmother's visit to Roulettenburg (precipitous ruin).

Of course, there is much to say about the gambling in「The Gambler」, but the thematic scope of the piece is far wider than just that. However, in this regard, it's impossible not to read the book in the shadow of Dostoevsky's more cogent works.

That said, after finishing the novel, I've been sitting on it with a sense that there is definitely more to be drawn out of its pages, that my reading has been marginal at best. So perhaps take my critique with a grain of salt.

This more or less concludes my thoughts on「The Gambler」for now, but it did also spark, within me, a newfound awareness of, as sad as it is to say, the difficulty of literacy. In the past couple weeks, this has been on my mind, in part contextualized by my reading「Beowulf」and by my listening, relistening, and further relistening of Bob Dylan's「Blood on the Tracks」. All three of these works are, in a vaguely discernible sense, extraordinary art, intricately woven with dense messaging. And although I think there is genuine good to be found in the straightforward consumption of such things for nothing beyond enjoyment, it is hard to ignore a strong sense that there is something that, in spite of my awareness of it, lies inaccessible to me.

Either way, tl;dr:「The Gambler」is solid, in particular exceptional as a portrait of the gambling itself. -​- ★★★★

• books
• Dostoevsky
• notes

This summer I've been trying to break a habit of never remembering to ever take photos of anything. That said, I was in Florence earlier in June and went on a hike near Fiesole. A couple miles in, it was brought to my attention that a dragonfly was hitching along for a ride:

I tried to shake it off and it wouldn't budge. Kept walking for a bit and it wouldn't budge. Eventually had to pry it off with a stick (really didn't want to somehow step on it). Gotta say, it was one helluva tenacious lil' dude xD

And yesterday, I was walking along Cheonggyecheon stream in Seoul and there was a grey heron perched along the riverside. The heron flew away after I took the photo, I guess it was a bit camera shy...

That's just about a comprehensive list of the nice (or at least I tell myself they're nice) photos I've taken of wildlife these past couple months, but here are a couple other shots I took while out and about.

• photography
• travel