Third Monday with Bob Boldt

The Grand Inquisitor: 
Loosely adapted from The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

By Bob Boldt

[This piece was written in October 2004 near the conclusion of the career of John Ashcroft. I live in Missouri, where our now ex-Attorney General’s strong imperial convictions, corruption, and even stronger religious fanaticism are legend.
    I am a believer in the concept of eternal recurrence. I have said elsewhere that I am certain that if Christ were to return to this sad world ruled by an empire that could teach even the Romans a thing or two about brutality and iron-fisted control of subject peoples, he would certainly be re-crucified.]

Third Monday Musing

Interior journeys: Reading stream of consciousness

By Eric Meub

[This is the first of Eric Meub's new monthly column.]

Why is Great Modern Literature at times so difficult to read? The challenges can range from elevated diction and obscure references to, occasionally, the total absence of a plot. My hardest struggle with the modern masterpieces, though, involved a narrative tool that’s known as interior monologue or stream of consciousness. This literary device locks the reader inside a character’s head: truly inside, with less of the “he thought…” or “it occurred to him…” of more conventional writing. In interior monologue, the reader listens to thoughts that play out in a fictional character’s consciousness in the order they occur. It’s sloppier than mind-reading and far more invasive. But the power of such a literary experience transcends our concepts of “a good read.”

The Grand Inquisitor "knew"

One of Christopher Hitchens's thematic quotes at the beginning of his God Is Not Great:

Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in your name, and beyond the grave they will find only death. But we will keep the secret, and for their own happiness we will entice them with a heavenly and eternal reward. —The Grand Inquisitor to his "Savior" in The Brothers Karamazov

So many of my posts over recent weeks have had to do with religion, and perhaps specifically with the question of the afterlife. A dear nephew of mine supposes, perhaps completely rightly, that the motive of religious belief at all is the believer's hope of eternal life. And of course, to be fair, I have to ask whether I myself am a good deal more concerned about this than I think. I don't think that I'm concerned about it in the least. I don't fear to die (though I do fear to maunder in a nursing home or somewhere, among unfamiliar things and people, waiting for the moment; among Richard Feynman's last recorded words was the statement: "God, I'm never going to do this again—what a bore").

At times I've felt so jubilantly alive and "fulfilled," that I've felt (and said aloud) that I could die at that moment and have no regrets. At other times, I've been so looking forward to accomplishing something in "this terrestrial realm," that I almost desperately wanted not to die...yet. That's the state I'm in now, as my friend's book is at the printer, we're readying our web site to sell it, and we're waiting expectantly to see how it sells....

And the second of my sisters to die awaits her going this very weekend. She's not expected to survive it. I know (or, again, let's be fair: I think) that she believes she will survive death and live eternally in some sense, in some realm. Our sister who died a couple of years ago already knows for sure...or knows nothing whatsoever. And my sister who awaits death this weekend will soon know for sure...or know nothing. And those of us who haven't gone yet do not know yet...and may never know anything at all.