I got into, started studying and eventually made a career out of computer programming because first I wanted to make clouds. The wispy vortices, plastic and mutable at a timescale just longer than that which is immediately perceptible, seemed the height of beauty and therefore the height of art.

This is a bit of a non-sequitur, I acknowledge, but is illustrative of the perspective I hold on art and beauty, establishing background for my next claim: I think The Brother’s Karamazov might be, after all of these years, my favorite novel, my favorite piece of art. The story is so compelling, so philosophically, psychologically, sociologically charged, and everyone in it, every person in it is such a storm of emotions, complex, turbulent, swirling, ablaze.

There are better writers out there; Nabokov, Joyce, García Márquez. Morrison writes more powerfully of trauma. I think Ulysses might be a perfect novel, perfectly realist, humanist, humane. The Brother’s Karamzov is not realist, it is saturated with color and form beyond what makes sense, but it captures what I think it is to be

In Hesse’s Rosshalde, Hesse describes our relationships with ancient works of (painted) art:

From the works of dead masters, over-life-sized strangers whose names we do not know and do not wish to know look out at us enigmatically as symbols of all being.

It may be a bit tortuous, but that quote kept coming back to me as I reread this, as the means with which I was relating to the characters. The names, I suppose, I do know and after all this is not a work of Vermeer but a well-documented story, but! The characters still look out, enigmatically, symbols of all being, of being sad or angry, jealous or confused, innocent or guilty, dubious and searching. It is of a very small number of books that made me want to believe in God. Liturgical, and lacerating.

Also unfortunately a bit anti-semitic, at really no effect on the rest of the story, just a few notes thrown in there to keep things spicy and problematic I guess. Always astonishing, the blindspots of an otherwise brilliant humanist full of sympathy for so many aspects of the human condition.

A good murder-mystery.