I realized while at my nieces college graduation celebration, as I watched and listened to words and topics exchanged amongst the celebrants, how indeed little in common currency I shared them. Watching the rain and spatter upon windows large and contrived, how the vast interests of humans, these contrivances to while away ennui and living, were utterly banal.
Of the billions of bipedal bifurcated enlarged brained animals pressed from vaginas and penises, a handful can be enumerated on fingertips as most profound. The rest of people, including this author, fall into the everydayness of Heidegger, or the plain uninspired averageness of Dostoyevsky description.
Now these noises blend into a moiety meaningless, perhaps the other moiety has meaning in some parlay or dance meant to defend against the sterility of the pens people find themselves contained in. For me it is still banal, pigs all.
Until such events scale my scenery, become denied. Wherefore shall I find completion? There is a call, a ghostly echo, like multiple footsteps on a busy street with your eyes closed, on the edges in a light hoping to focus on my being, my time. I have yet to discover the sublime.
The rain is nearly always more interesting than the sun.
Dostoevsky average? This cannot be. Read the description of the horse being beaten to death in Crime and Punishment. Fair enough, he wasn’t in the same league as Tolstoy when it came to description, but then who is? But I know what you mean.
I think some of your work fits the description of sublime. Kantian in excelsis.
It is art.
Never the mass.
With the ant-heap the respectable race of ants began and with the ant-heap they will probably end. – Dostoevsky. Notes from the underground.
For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type of his own—a type of commonplaceness which will not for the world, if it can help it, be contented, but strains and yearns to be something original and independent, without the slightest possibility of being so. To this class of commonplace people belong several characters in this novel;—characters which—I admit—I have not drawn very vividly up to now for my reader’s benefit.
Such were, for instance, Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsin, her husband, and her brother, Gania.
There is nothing so annoying as to be fairly rich, of a fairly good family, pleasing presence, average education, to be “not stupid,” kind-hearted, and yet to have no talent at all, no originality, not a single idea of one’s own—to be, in fact, “just like everyone else.”
Of such people there are countless numbers in this world—far more even than appear. They can be divided into two classes as all men can—that is, those of limited intellect, and those who are much cleverer. The former of these classes is the happier.
To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.
dostoyevsky
Dostoyevsky is far from average. for me he is the prophet, the first. I was thinking of the idiot at he beginning of Part iv, dostoyevsky takes a break from the story flow and embarks upon a short dissertation of commonplaceness and it’s dominance as a force for most of humanity. I always go back and read that section when I think I’ve hit the sublime. Like a tonic of bracing vinegar, a shock which brings one back to the earth I float on.
Dostoyevsky is far from average. for me he is the prophet, the first. I was thinking of the idiot at he beginning of Part iv, dostoyevsky takes a break from the story flow and embarks upon a short dissertation of commonplaceness and it’s dominance as a force for most of humanity. I always go back and read that section when I think I’ve hit the sublime. Like a tonic of bracing vinegar, a shock which brings one back to the earth I float on.
Indeed, indeed. We -most of us at least – are the very ink on Dostoevsky’s paper, those indecipherable cursives, unique to each and every hand, some dark and heavy, some light and airy, some sharp, some bold, some exuberant and boastful, some downtrodden, each one a story and he knows them all.
He also tells jokes.