Skip to main content

Insufferable Tyrant

Reading Brothers Karamazov after thirty years is turning out to be a very satisfying experience. It is like reading a whole new book and discovering things there that I did not pay any attention to in the immaturity of youth. Like this little gem about a woman who was cruel not because she was evil 

"..so terrible were her sufferings from the caprice and everlasting nagging of this old woman, who was apparently not bad-hearted but had become an insufferable tyrant through idleness"

To become an insufferable tyrant through idleness is not a concept I would have grasped as a teen. What did that even mean. At that age, life is more black and white - good and evil people, happy and sad days and so on. This line recalled to mind one of my father's favorite homilies he used to rouse me to gainful action "An idle mind is the devil's workshop". I was indulging in all kinds of idle - refusing to learns skills he tried to teach me, not working hard enough at school, not trying to achieve mastery at anything I was good at. That line used to irritate me in the moment but it also gave me something to ponder. What was I doing with my idle mind that was the work of the devil's workshop? 

The answer was not so evident back then but it became more evident over the years. Attributing more heft to problems than they deserved was one of the big ones, thinking that my life was somehow uniquely messed up relative to others was a closely related second. Consequently, finding someone to blame for my troubles became a response to crisis instead of gathering my wits to solve things on my own. Lessons were learned the hard way and over the years there was far less if any time for pure idleness. Not quite the insufferable tyrant that Dostoyevsky describes but idleness as my father saw it in me did not make me a better person that is for sure. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more