Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: Part II

I flipped through the second half of Brothers K just now, and man, it's overwhelming. It's not that I don't enjoy it, but the prospect of reading another 300+ pages is daunting. For example, an upcoming chapter is called, "The Beginning of the Official Perkhotin's Career." Not only is this the least exciting title Dosty could have chosen, but we haven't even met Official Perkhotin yet and probably won't for a long time. It's rather like running a marathon: even if you've already run a dozen or so miles, you're still just barely halfway done. So, we better get on with it.

Despite my whining, Part II was astounding. Several important events occur: Alyosha pledges to marry Lise, the crippled daughter of Madame Khokhlakova; Smerdyakov sets into motion events that will give Dmitri the opportunity and the motive to kill his father; Alyosha meets Snegiryov, a man whom Dmitri disgraced, and his son, Ilyusha; and finally, Elder Zosima recounts his life story and dies. 

Most significantly (at least to me), Part II is when Ivan and Alyosha have lunch together; it is there, in Book V, that Ivan's philosophy and worldview finally get a full treatment, and it's far and away the greatest 30 or 40 pages I've ever read. Ivan is what makes me come back to this book over and again.


Ivan, the Riddle

"Brother Dmitri says of you -- Ivan is a tomb! I say of you, Ivan is a riddle." -- Alyosha

No one has a secure understanding of Ivan. His father says he has "no particular learning," but his not-so-secret love, Katerina, thinks he is "so learned, such an academician." In Part I, he argued for the authority of the church to replace the authority of the state -- a position which even the monks did not support -- despite being a confirmed atheist. It is rather significant, then, that Alyosha calls Ivan a "riddle." We have heard much of riddles already, especially from Dmitri, who declared the beauty of this world to be a riddle sent from God, one which he could neither comprehend nor bear. As we will see throughout the novel, particularly in this part, Ivan is incredibly complex, rich, and conflicted. 


Ivan, the Romantic

"Love life more than the meaning of it?" -- Ivan

At the beginning of their lunch, Alyosha and Ivan get along without incident. Despite Alyosha having more or less outed his brother for being in love with Katerina hours prior, the two find they have more in common than anticipated. Specifically, they share a love of life. Ivan is the first to wax romantic: "I love the sticky little leaves in spring," he says, paraphrasing Pushkin, and nutshells his love by saying, "It's not a matter of intellect or logic, it's loving with one's inside, with one's guts." 

We should first notice that, in the following Book, Elder Zosima commands those gathered around his deathbed to "love every leaf," which suggests an intellectual and possibly spiritual connection between the tortured Ivan and the serene Zosima. Regardless, Alyosha is delighted to hear this. "I think everyone should love life above everything else in the world," he says, prompting Ivan to ask, in my favorite line in all of literature, "Love life more than the meaning of it?" It sounds to me like he asks half in derision and half in earnest. He clearly does love life more than the meaning of it -- what meaning is there in sticky little leaves? -- but the prospect of love over logic is worthy of ridicule to him still. In asking his question, he wants Alyosha -- or someone, anyone -- to admit it, so that he can see for himself that it is a possibility. He wants someone to say the words, to bring the fact into the world, that love can trump logic, and Alyosha does not disappoint: "Certainly," he declares without hesitation, "love it, regardless of logic as you say, it must be regardless of logic, and it's only then one will understand the meaning of it." One must love first, Alyosha says, and meaning will follow. Moreover, Ivan must recognize the implication of that statement: Chasing meaning will get you nowhere.

Ivan, the geometer

"I made up my mind long ago not to understand." -- Ivan

From here, Ivan more or less forces Alyosha to enter into a discussion about God. He does not, however, give up his worldview easily. He begins stupidly, because "stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a scoundrel, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.”

The gist of his tirade is that he "accepts God," but the details are murkier. I will quote this part of his speech at length because it was endlessly profound when I first read it in high school, and it still is: 

“But you must note this: if God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions in space. Yet there have been and still are geometricians and philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely the whole of being, was only created in Euclid’s geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can’t understand even that, I can’t expect to understand about God… And I advise you never to think about it either, my dear Alyosha, especially about God, whether He exists or not… And so I accept God and am glad to, and what’s more I accept His wisdom and His purpose, which are entirely unknown to us, I believe in the underlying order and the meaning of life, I believe in the eternal harmony in which they say we shall one day be blended, I believe in the Word to Which the universe is striving, and Which Itself was ‘with God,’ and Which Itself is God and so on, and so on, to infinity… It’s the world created by Him I don’t and cannot accept… I believe like a child…that, finally, in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will occur and be revealed that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the redemption of all the crimes of humanity… Let this, let all this come true and be revealed, but I don’t accept it and don’t want to accept it! Let the parallel lines even meet and I see it myself; I’ll see it and say that they met, but still I won’t accept it.”

Ivan dismisses all arguments about the existence of God with elegance. There is no need to argue, he says, because we don't have the capacity to understand God. You must take it on faith either way, because if you with your Euclidean mind can't even understand everything that has been thought up by a brutish creature like man, how can you claim -- how can you dare -- to say you know anything about God? 

Ivan's tirade also touches on several points that have been recurring in the novel. His final statement is, "Let the parallel lines even meet... I'll see it and say that they met, but still I won't accept it." Miracles -- in this case, the phenomenon of parallel lines meeting -- are never a stumbling block for the realist, the narrator said in Part I. Faith does not come from the miracle, but the miracle from faith (cf. doubting Thomas). Ivan may be rebellious and revolutionary, but he is just another human being; he is just like everyone else who sees but refuses to believe.  

This is also the time to remember Dmitri's words from Part I: "God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the two shores of the river meet and all contradictions stand side by side." God's riddles -- perhaps more specifically here, God's temptations -- furiously assail Dmitri, whereas Ivan dismisses them. There is surely more here than a mere comparison of the brothers, but I'm out of ideas.

Ivan, the heretic

"I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for." -- Ivan

Unfortunately, matters are never simple with Ivan. Though he says he accepts God, he does not accept the world that's been created by him nor the world to come. What, in particular, is unacceptable to him? 

It is suffering, although not suffering in general. Men deserve to suffer, he says: "I think if the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness." (Alyosha points out the chain of logic this creates: God created man in His likeness, man created the devil in his likeness, hence God and the devil are alike to Ivan. But more on that later.) Men deserve to suffer because men are evil, men are sinful, men do horrible things, and no one is exempt... except children.

At the heart of Ivan's rejection of religion is his rejection of original sin, the doctrine that each person is sinful because his ancestors -- in Christianity, Adam and Eve; for Ivan, his father -- were sinful. We have come to the real problem: Ivan's hatred of Fyodor; but as it is not addressed directly yet, let's leave it for now. At the moment, Ivan is more concerned with the suffering of innocent children. “If everyone must suffer in order to buy eternal harmony without suffering, what do children have to do with it, tell me, please?” He can't accept the suffering of children for the sins of their fathers, and he tells Alyosha gruesome stories about the abuse and torture of children in order to get him to agree. 

Finally, he sums everything up with immortal words: “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return to him the ticket.” “That’s rebellion,” Alyosha whispers, referring to Lucifer's rebellion against God (recall that Satan was originally an angel who waged war in Heaven). This is the power of this section and the genius of Dostoevsky. Ivan is more complex than a run-of-the-mill atheist (for example, Smerdyakov). He believes in God, believes in Him so much that he holds Him accountable for the suffering of children. It is one thing to believe in God or dismiss Him; it's quite another to condemn Him. 

Ivan, the poet

"It's a ridiculous thing, but I want to tell it to you..." -- Ivan 

I have too much to say about Ivan's prose poem, "The Grand Inquisitor," but I can't fit it all here. You should go read it. Take fifteen minutes out of your day, go read it, and then tell me what you think. If I can, I might make a separate post dedicated to this chapter alone. 

Ivan clearly identifies himself with the Inquisitor, the man in charge of the Spanish Inquisition, in charge of torturing unbelievers and heretics into faith in order to lift the burden of free will and grant them the gift of eternal life that he feels was unjustly withheld  when Jesus turned down the offers of bread (fulfillment of physical needs  and desires), angels (proof of divinity, compulsion to believe), and dominion (an irrevocable position of power on the earth) made to him by the devil, whom the Inquisitor heretically calls the "wise and mighty spirit of the wilderness." 

At the core of the story, though, is love. He feels that, by leaving room for suffering ("There is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger.") and doubt (“Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle.”), Jesus excepted too much of men.  “Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter.” 

This is the immeasurable sadness of Ivan's story. The Inquisitor (and Ivan) feels betrayed. In his mind, he is like the lovelorn youth scorned by his one and only; the child experiencing the first broken promise from his parents; Caesar suffering a final knife in his back from Brutus ("And you?"). He is the butt of any and every betrayal, and his is compounded by the fact that it was his God who betrayed him. When he tells Jesus, "I love thee not," it destroys you, because it is the human answer to Jesus' own lament on the cross of "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He has been abandoned, betrayed, left wandering in the wilderness. 

But in the face of his hatred, Jesus loves him. When his tirade is finished, Jesus, who has remained silent throughout the story, kisses him, and the Inquisitor, taken aback, frees him but commands him to never return. I don't want to say anything else; let's not speculate about Ivan's faith any further than to say that, in the story he composed, Jesus still loves the world; that, in the story, he has not abandoned the Inquisitor. 


Zosima and Truth

"All things are good and wonderful, because all is truth." -- Zosima

The other major character of Part II is Elder Zosima, whose death is the focus of Book VI. Before he dies, he recounts his life story, sprinkled with the beliefs that have shaped his life. The main thing I want to emphasize about Zosima is his relationship to Ivan. Although the two have little interaction in the book, there is certainly an overlap of ideas, especially when it comes to love of life. More significantly, however, I think we are meant to see the contrast between the tortured mind of Ivan -- and Dmitri, and Fyodor, and so many others -- and the simple truth of Zosima. 

One thing the translator, Susan McReynolds Oddo, points out in her introduction is that Zosima often leaves out large portions of the scriptures that he quotes and that what he leaves out is often more telling than what he quotes. One example of this is when Zosima recounts the story of Job. While we can draw parallels between Job -- abandoned by God, but still devout -- and Ivan, I just want to mention this: In the story, Job's entire family is killed, but in return for his devotion, he is blessed with another family. Of this, Zosima says: “But how could he love those new ones when those first children are no more, when he has lost them? … It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.” The injustice of suffering is no injustice at all to Zosima, who attributes death to God but also healing. He quotes another Bible verse (which also happens to be the epigraph of the book): “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” 

Zosima's death is the first one we see in the novel, but it is certainly not the last. We would do well to keep theodicy in mind, and the attitude Zosima has toward death and suffering.
 

Stray Observations

• This post is significantly less complete and focused than I would have liked it to be, but there's just too much. Hopefully you got something out of it. (And if not, just read this book. Like, holy crap, guys, it's worth it). 
• Another line about Ivan by Fyodor that I forgot to fit in elsewhere: “But Ivan loves nobody, Ivan is not one of us, people like Ivan are not our sort, my boy, they are like a cloud of dust. When the wind blows, the dust will be gone.”
• A big event that I didn't mention at all: Alyosha's encounter of Ilyusha, a young boy who bites his finger in retaliation for Dmitri dragging his father, Snegiryov, out of a bar by his beard. Ilyusha sees this happen, runs up to Dmitri, kisses his hand, and begs him to stop. Snegiryov tells Alyosha: “For our children... know what justice means, sir… But at that moment in the square when he kissed his hand, at that moment my Ilyushka went through the whole truth, sir. That truth entered into him and crushed him forever, sir.” Ilyusha (apparently) becomes important later on, so we'll talk more about him later. 
• Zosima's quote about all being truth is reminiscent of the closing line from Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "'beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" Keats wrote the poem around 60 years before Dostoevsky wrote Brothers K, so it'd be interesting to know if Dosty read him.
• Zosima also talks about the butterfly effect: “All is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.” This idea has shown up in Buddhism (see Siddhartha), but also in Greek religious mysticism. The mathematician Pythagoras, who believed in metempsychosis, says in Ovid's Metamorphosis: "And time itself is like a river, flowing on an endless course." It's pretty awesome how these ideas show up. 
• The Grand Inquisitor says, “So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.” This is reminiscent of something Karl Popper said (as quoted in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum): "The conspiracy theory of society... comes from abandoning God and then asking: 'Who is in his place?'"  

Materialism #1: Of Change, Imperative and Impermanent

[This post is a detour from my usual discussion of books. Once in a while, when a particular idea strikes me, I’d like to spend a few pages meditating on it, drawing from books, music, TV, and the rest. Since these posts will directly address the titular “Materials for Living,” I’ll call them, for lack of a better pun, “Materialisms.”]

I rewatched some old Simpsons episodes recently, and I was struck by how poignant and well-written the early episodes are. One I remember particularly is Lisa’s Substitute, wherein Homer’s inadequacy as a father is brought to light when Lisa develops a crush on her substitute teacher, Mr. Bergstrom. The episode is funny enough, but it’s the climax that really makes it stand out. Whereas a normal show would have made Bergstrom’s departure the focus of the final act, he leaves the episode with minutes to spare. The last scene, instead, focuses on what was left in his wake; Lisa, having seen what it’s like to have a strong male role model – someone who’s cultured, attentive, and holds her hand when he takes her to museums – realizes what a poor father Homer has been and calls him out at dinner. It’s an outburst that has been building all episode, and when it happens, it has the clockwork inevitability of real life.

More relevant to today’s discussion, however, is the episode Team Homer. Mr. Burns becomes the unwitting financier of Homer’s bowling team, and when he finds out, he asks to join instead of releasing the hounds on him. Burns chalks up his surprising request to one of his “trademark changes of heart.” When they win the league championship, Burns discards the rest of the team and keeps the trophy for himself, causing Homer to muse, “I guess some people never change,” and then correct himself: “Or they quickly change and then quickly change back.”

The feeling that I want to write about was put into words for me for the first time in Eeeee Eee Eeee by Tao Lin. When Ellen’s mother reminds her of something she once did as a child, Ellen becomes indignant that her mother is bringing something up from the past:

“ ‘That wasn’t me. I mean, I can’t be held accountable for anything I’ve done in the past,’ Ellen said. She was startled a little. Was this true? ‘Each moment… is just a moment. Time is like, a thing. And space is another thing. You wouldn’t say I’m responsible for things occupying other spaces, like everyone killing everyone else in wars or beating a wife. So you shouldn’t say I’m responsible for things that occupy other areas of time.’ She was excited. It made sense. She felt like she could do things now. Play and be wild and not have to be afraid or nervous anymore. Then the feeling passed. She could do nothing. She couldn’t play with anyone. The feeling always passed.’”

The feeling always passed.

This reminds me of three separate things. The first, just briefly, is the song “Lua” by Bright Eyes, where the final line of the verses is a variation on a theme:

“What’s so easy in the evening by the morning’s such a drag.”

“What was so normal in the evening by the morning seems insane.”

“What’s so simple in the moonlight now is so complicated.”

And so on. The feeling always passed.

The second is this relevant xkcd. I’ll withhold my thoughts about The Game for a separate post, perhaps, because it’s the second-to-last panel that I want to focus on. An epiphany is defined as a moment of sudden revelation or insight, but in the cartoon, the girl doesn’t talk about a single epiphany, but a multitude, a parade of moments, one after another, wherein the character thinks he has fixed his life. She holds him accountable for failing to follow through, for treating moments of clarity like a string of one-night-stands.

But is he accountable? Epicurus would say that the most intense feelings are also the most fleeting. Epiphanies are by their very nature unsustainable. That strengthening of resolve that urges your blood to rush and makes you feel invincible can’t last. People change, but they quickly change back; the feeling always passes.

The final reference is what compelled me to write this post. In my reading of The Brothers Karamazov, I encountered the following passage. Father Zosima is telling stories from his life, and spends a while on a mysterious man he met who confessed to him in secret (before he became a monk) that he had killed a man. In ministering to him, Zosima says, “And he would go away seeming comforted, but next day he could come again, bitter, pale, sarcastic.” The feeling always passed.

Perhaps I was drawn to write this post because I’m at one of those do-or-die moments in life (though you could argue that every moment is a do-or-die moment). In my daily reading, I sometimes come across passages that inspire me, and in a moment of clarity, I suddenly know how to start a story or continue one or finish another. And then when I start writing, when I actually have to put my jumbled thoughts into words, the feeling passes. The feeling always passes, and it makes me wonder what I’m doing with my life. To paraphrase one of my desert-island, top-five favorite movies, High Fidelity, only people of a certain disposition are frightened of not knowing what to do with their lives at the age of 22, and I am of that disposition. Nevertheless, it’s a very real worry, that the ideas I have that stir me to action are unambiguously impotent.

Even the resolve to write this post waned. I thought of it in the middle of the night (cue every Taylor Swift song ever) when all the above quotes appeared in my mind like planets aligning, and I knew I had something. But in the morning, when the pragmatic light of day dispelled all simple, quiet darkness, those quotes were there, but nothing else. I could do nothing. The feeling always passed.

Perhaps it’s the strength of each epiphany that makes its dissipation all the more devastating. It’s hard not to place grand significance on moments when everything comes together, but when their powers invariably ebb, I don’t think there’s a reason to disparage them and blame yourself, the way the xkcd girl does. Maybe the true significance of epiphanies is the gradual change they bring about.

I am thinking of the sorites paradox, attributed to Eubulides of Miletus, a philosopher who was a contemporary of Aristotle (and apparently hated him, which makes him a pretty cool guy to me). The paradox can be formulated in this way: assume you have a pile of sand, from which you remove one grain. Undoubtedly, you would still call it a pile. In fact, if you removed another twenty or thirty, or even one hundred grains, it would still maintain its pile-ness. But if you can continue this indefinitely, you’ll eventually be left with just one grain, which would be a poor excuse for a pile. So at what point does a pile stop being a pile?

Let’s look at it the other way around. If you start with just a single epiphany, it is unable to elicit any meaningful change, just as a single grain of sand is not a pile. Indeed, even a few dozen epiphanies, as xkcd points out, may not induce any real change. But when the number of epiphanies grows, it must pass a point when the set of epiphanies becomes a permanent change without one noticing it – maybe because each epiphany brought forth a miniscule, but nonzero, change, or maybe because things can only change when they’re not being watched.

My point is this: The disappearance of each individual epiphany can be devastating, but focusing on it is not seeing the forest for the trees. Change isn’t quick or easy. It’s a very American mindset to think that life-altering insights will come without working for them (think self-help books and New Year’s resolutions). Just because the feeling passes doesn’t mean it wasn’t significant and won’t be significant down the road. As Shakespeare said, Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.

In just a day or two, I’ll post an entry on Part II of Brothers K, followed by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned. 

Virgil, The Aeneid

Okay, I think I'm getting the hang of this blogging thing. Today's entry is on Virgil's The Aeneid, which, despite being one of the best examples of beautifully written Latin, is basically fanfiction of the Odyssey. (I forget where I first heard that comparison; if I didn't think of it myself, I probably read it on some cesspool of the internet.) Aeneas, a Trojan briefly mentioned in the Iliad, flees his home after the end of the Trojan War and, following a prophecy that he will found the greatest empire the world has ever known, sets off on a journey to Italy. The first half of the poem takes us through his journey from Troy to Italy – including a very passionate relationship with Dido – and the last half tells about the war he wages against Latinus, king of the Latiums, the native people of the land where he must build his kingdom. Again, I'll organize my thoughts under a few headings. This will probably be the general format of my future posts.


Language

Since I'm a pleb and can't read Latin, there were a couple popular options for translations: the Bernard Knox and Robert Fagles edition is probably the standard, and their versions of the Iliad/Odyssey were very good; Allen Mandelbaum, whose translation of Ovid I'll write about in a couple weeks, was also an attractive choice (plus, I like having a variety of spines on my bookshelf; the uniform, black Penguin Classics get monotonous). I settled, however, on Sarah Ruden's translation, which was the newest and the most colorful and idiosyncratic.

Translation is especially important for the Greeks and Romans because they are, to me, the most satisfying books to pick up and begin reading. Though they tend to become long-winded and tedious (the Aeneid's 300 pages took way too long), their capacity for description and metaphor is unparalleled; it's what made me think for a few months in college that I should be a classics major. Ruden did a great job with the language. Like the original, her translation was in verse (beautifully rendered iambic pentameter, the English equivalent of Latin's crazy-ass meter). I won't belabor this point, but here are just a few really beautiful lines from throughout the poem:

"The smile that clears the sky of storms."
"Wrench away the towering sky."
"Uproot the sea."

"Muse, tell me why." This is a much simpler invocation to the muse than you usually see, without the anger of the Iliad's "Rage" or the exuberance of the Odyssey's "Sing to me, muse!" It's desperate, lamenting, unfit for the start of an epic poem, yet it's a powerful choice of words. Virgil is trying to understand how the gods could allow all the ills that befell Aeneas to happen, and so he understandably asks, "Why?" It's the plea of a man trying to make sense of an irrational and uncaring universe. It's the same question Neil Young asks in that great song. And it's the question that Dido seems to ask when Aeneas leaves her, and Turnus when his city is ruined by the Trojans just as their city was ruined by the Greeks. "Tell me why."

This is not even mentioning the choice descriptions of battle and gore. The Saw series has nothing on the Greeks and Romans. But I digress. 


Biblical Allusions

A couple major parallels to the Bible occur in the poem. Anchises, Aeneas' father, dies before he reaches Italy, but not until he catches a glimpse of the coast. "There is your Italy," the son says to the father. Moses, of course, was prohibited from entering the Promised Land, but he was able to stand on a mountaintop and look at the land for which he had wandered forty years in the desert.

Aeneas is told that when he gets to Italy, he will find that it has already been settled, and that the only way to establish his kingdom is to kill 'em all. "The race you must defeat is rough and hardy," he is warned. This should remind us of the story immediately following the death of Moses, wherein the Israelites had to conquer the Canaanites in the Promised Land before they could settle there. It should also remind us of, well, you know... America. Ahem.

Speaking of religion, there's a throwaway comment made by a minor character, Nisus, during the battle again Latinus that stood out to me. Nisus says to his friend, and apparently lover, Euryalus:

"Is it gods who make me want this [fights, war, battle, etc.]
Or do we make our deadly urges gods?"

Nothing more is said of this, but it's an incredibly self-aware line. 


Rumor

Rumor -- "the swiftest plague there is" -- is personified and employed to a degree that I haven't seen before. It's common enough for the ancients to attribute forces they don't understand to gods, but the spread of rumors is a unique one. Rumors have lately entered into academic study in political science and sociology, and also in mathematics. I haven't read much about it, but as a phenomenon, it's exactly the sort of thing that would be seen as a divine (or demonic) process: rumors leak, they spread with in an instant, they arise spontaneously. If anyone can recall another human phenomenon (as opposed to a natural phenomenon like lightning) that gets the same supernatural treatment, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

Love

The Romans appreciate love poetry more than the Greeks did. While the latter did have the ethereal fragments of Sappho (I highly recommend Anne Carson's elegant translation), the Romans have Catullus and Ovid, among others.

When Aeneas deserts Dido by sneaking out in the morning before she wakes up, it's played-out and almost comical to our modern sensibilities, but for Dido it stirs some of the most devastating lines in the poem:

“If pleading has a chance still, change your mind.”

“Now I must call you guest instead of husband.”

“What did you feel then, Dido, when you saw [Aeneas leave]? 

How did you sob when all that shoreline seethed? / … / 

Reprobate Love, wrencher of mortal hearts! 

He drives her now to tears, and now to beg  

And cravenly submit her pride to love – 

Whatever leaves her with a hope of life.” 

Notice Love is personified, too, not as Cupid, but as "reprobate." That's a damn good word, Ms. Ruden.

Turnus and the Problem of Fate

Since Aeneas anticlimactically manages to avoid most of the woes that Odysseus encounters -- he is warned of Scylla and Charybdis as well as the Cyclops, and really has a pretty all right journey, all things considered -- the role of primary antagonist in the poem falls on Turnus. The problem? Turnus is actually a pretty cool guy.

When Aeneas gets to Latium, he sees Lavinia, King Latinus' daughter, and tells her father that he wishes to marry her. Latinus says that that is impossible, since she is betrothed to Turnus, and that he's sorry, but Aeneas says, "Fuck you," and goes to war with them so that he can marry her once he's defeated her city and killed her father.

Turnus, however, stands in his way. He is a great warrior, one who has been likened to Achilles by commentators, but he is ultimately defeated because his will runs counter to fate. The struggle is futile because it's recognized by everyone that Aeneas will win; after all, even the gods can't intervene and change fate. Even though Turnus is, by all accounts, in the right by defending his hometown and his fiancee, he can only be the bad guy in a poem like this. 

For this reason, I think the saddest part of the story -- sadder than Dido's suicide, than Aeneas' account of the fall of Troy, than the innumerable deaths -- is when Turnus comes to terms with the fact that, despite his prowess and his virtue, he will die. The queen has killed herself in frenzied mourning, and Turnus is watching the city "which he himself had raised" being conquered. Here are some lines:

“Murranus died – I saw, he called to me; 

No one still living is a dearer friend – 

When a massive wound brought down his massive body.” (The repetition of "massive" just kills, doesn't it?)

“Should I let them raze the town (that’s all that’s missing?) / … /

Is death so terrible? Spirits below, 

Bless me! The gods above have turned away.”

“Who sent you [Turnus' sister, Juturna] from Olympus on this mission –

To see your hapless brother’s brutal death? 

What can I do? What stroke of luck could save me?”

"He stood and stared in silence. In one heart 

Surged endless shame, madness infused with grief, 

Love spurred by fury, and the pride of courage.” 

The poem ends with the final battle between Turnus and Aeneas, wherein Turnus raises a boulder with which to crush Aeneas but suddenly -- as if by some divine or super-divine force -- his strength leaves him, and he is killed by Aeneas. One would think that Aeneas, who has been portrayed as infinitely honorable and has suffered the same injustices that he's now perpetrating on Latium, would be merciful to Turnus, and if fact he is, until he sees the belt of Pallas, a Trojan who was killed, around Turnus' waist. 

The final line of poem describes Aeneas killing Turnus, whose soul descends into the underworld. That's another powerful part of this poem: Virgil is basically saying, Fuck denouement; it all ends with a violent, merciless climax. 


Next up is Ovid's Metamorphosis, along with some of his shorter works on love. Since it's a pretty long book, the next post will likely be the second part of the Brothers K.