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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. 

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