Fall Back, Move Forward

The clocks changed today. We are gifted with an extra hour of the day and the question is, “What will we do with it?” Talk a walk? Strum a guitar? Dig out an old favorite recipe and cook a delicious meal? Call voters?" Me, I might sit on the back deck and read the next chapter of my current book, “The Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a book which will probably soon be banned from the Left unless the title is changed to “The Neurodivergent Man (he/his).” 

 

Speaking of banned books and the gift of extra hours, Dostoevsky’s biography is quite remarkable. Back in the 1940’s in Moscow, he joined a literary group called The Petrashevksy Circle and they would meet and sometimes discuss banned books that dared to criticize Tsarist Russia. Tsarist Russia, like Trumpist America, did not like that and arrested Dostoevsky, sentencing him and others to death. The group actually was led out to the firing squad and minutes before being executed, a letter arriving commuting their sentence to four years in a Siberian prison camp instead. Followed by six years of compulsory military service. 

 

Can you imagine those moments before the letter came? In the character of the Prince (the “idiot” in the book who is anything but), Dostoevsky weaves the real story into the fictional one: “To be killed by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than to be killed by robbers. A man stabbed by robbers in the forest still hopes he’ll be saved until the very last minute. But when sentenced for execution, all hope is taken away for certain and the whole torment lies in the certainty that there’s no escape. There’s no greater torment in the world than that."

 

He then goes on. “Maybe there’s a man who has had the sentence read to him, has been allowed to suffer and has then been told, ‘Go, you’re forgiven.” That man might be able to tell us something.”

 

That man, as noted, was Dostoevsky and he indeed goes on to use an entire lifetime re-gifted to him to tell us something, in the form of some of the most notable books in all of literature. 

 

The clock is ticking toward Tuesday and there is a hint of that feeling of a date set for either an execution—the death of Democracy— or a reprieve— Kamala wins!! Here’s some Dostoevsky’s quotes that Republicans and non-voters would do well to consider. (The first might be preceded by “You may excuse other’s lies, but…”)

 

• Above all, don’t lie to yourself. 

• The worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

• Man has it all in his hands, and it slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice. 

• Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles. 

 

 And for those needing encouragement if the unthinkable happens:

 

• The soul is healed by being with children.

• If you want to overcome the world, overcome yourself.

• Allow me to give you some advice from the heart. There is a single refuge, a single medicine: art and creative work.

• The deeper the grief, the closer is God. 

• The darker the night, the brighter the stars.

 

The clocks changed today, falling back to grant us an extra hour. Let us use that time to move forward, in whatever way suits our character.