Part
One: The Unhappy Family
The
characters in certain Russian novels, as a genre, have a curious habit of
experiencing great revelations, falling on their faces in moments of ecstatic
clarity, shouting their innermost thoughts with many exclamation points and
many ellipses, and setting off into the future with bold ideals aflame within
them. They are forever going into raptures or suicidal rage over the time of
day, the sticky leaf buds, the fact that no one answered the door, or just how
Russian Russia is. You
know that someone is a bad guy in a Russian novel when he has the presence of
mind to speak at something less than full throttle and in French.
(What
I find especially curious about all this expressiveness on the printed page is
that most of the Russians I know in real life are extremely reserved.)
I was
trying to figure out whether the emotional intensity comes about because the
protagonists of these novels are all in their teens or early twenties (there is
always the wise old man with a Russian face who serves as a sort of foil to
their youthful exuberance and confusion), or if this is how a person should live,
even as an adult: in a constant state of amazement.
There
are little revelations in my life, even daily when I remember to notice them,
but I am not shocked that there are revelations. I
occasionally discover something new and exciting to become but it does not make
me fall on my face in the haymow; it feels more like checking the mail and
learning that there is a sale on the pots I need from IKEA: like, oh, yes,
correct, goody, what hashgacha, let me put that on my calendar, it will be fun
to get round to that.
I began to wonder whether the emotional
intensity of Russian novels should be attributed to the fact that so many of
them were written by aristocrats: perhaps, I said, this is what people
experience every day when they have no housework to do (since no matter what
turmoil you experience in life, dishes remain dishes)...
...but no. The answer to this riddle (thank
you Rabbi Estuary) is that one doesn't experience constant, dramatic, sweeping
redefinitions of self and the world unless one is a bit lost about how to
define oneself to begin with.
(In other words, you don't make a good
Russian novel unless you are an “unhappy family”...)
…
Part Two: So What Is Life Like in the Happy
Family?
In the Megilla of Esther, Achashverosh
wished to rescind the taxes from the province to which his new queen belonged;
and, when she would not tell him which it was, he rescinded the taxes from all
127 provinces. This morning I saw (in Rav Brevda – so the Gra, probably) a
strange verse in Ch. 10, at the very end of the Megilla. There has been life
and death and political intrigue and hangings and rioting in the streets – and
what is on Achashverosh's mind? Reinstating those taxes. Achashverosh hu
Achashverosh, he remains the same villain at the end that he was at the
beginning; he is completely unaffected by Purim.
Which is not the case with the Jews, who are
still putting a fedora on the lab skeleton and turning the furniture in the
classroom on its nose to celebrate Adar, not even Purim yet, a thousand-odd
years later.
So yes- a person is supposed to be sensitive
to the lessons set out in this world. “When life gets boring, make yourself
interesting,” said Rabbi Iridescent to me, once. Or as my friend Zokaif said
once, sometimes we need to furnish our own background music.
The little revelations do not make for great
Russian fiction, but they are not so little for that. Sometimes the sticky
little leaves are in the housework.
G-d is in the Megilla although His Name is
not.
No comments:
Post a Comment