re-reads

I had strep throat earlier this week.

I was rendered inert upon my bed for two days.

I was also, in a nutshell, pathetic.

I cried one afternoon because I felt so terrible.  Really?  Me?  A grown woman who just took antibiotics and knows she will recover in a few days, crying.  Alas, it is true.

One benefit of that illness, counted amidst the bigger blessing of all my children being school age so I could actually lay sick in bed, was that I dug out some old friends to read.

One of my very favorite classes in college was my Russian literature in translation class.  Oh, I become happy just typing that course title.  The German literature in translation class is a very close second. But Tolstoy, Chekov, Dostoevsky?  They taught me about a different place in the world, and also about myself.  My teacher was excellent and broke open the culture and the novels so that we, as young readers with western experiences in a far different era, could understand what these literary works meant to the people who received and read them when they were written.  It was a history, political science, theology and religion and literature class all rolled into one.

I swoon.

I am re-reading Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Brother's Karamazov".  Now if I only had kept all my lecture notes.

It is funny how I now need reading glasses to decode the text.  And what felt like ancient history to me in college is not so far back from an adult's perspective.  He wrote in the late 1800s.

One thing that I'm greatly enjoying this go round is remembering that Dostoevsky became a devout orthodox Christian, rejecting his more radical ideas about faith, when he was imprisoned in Siberia for years.  He only had a Bible to read.

God wastes nothing.

His epitaph is John 12:24, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit".

That is also the epigraph to this novel, "The Brothers Karamazov".

"Crime and Punishment" is perhaps a more well known work by Dostoevsky.  I couldn't find my copy of that!  It'll have to wait.  I've got 600 pages of the brothers to read first!

Reading is a huge indulgence to me.  Sitting still for a few days I am not at all good at.  It was almost like being put in time out, and I chafed at the bit.  I usually can only bring myself to read at night before bed.  It feels like the days work is complete then and I can escape into a book then.

Being sick clearly has its benefits!  Hours upon hours of pages rustling and turning.  A sweet repast indeed.

Don't be bored by me.  I'm know I'm weird.  It is okay.