I really enjoy Dostoyevsky’s narrative. I have only read beginning the book, but there is something that caught my attention that I would like to “blog” about. It is interesting to notice how writers often find ways of exploring the human complexity in a way that I could not in all my methodical meditations. It is sort of similar to an enlightening and most often leaves one me with a gratitude for reading that I doubt will ever be replaced. However, back to this passage that caught my attention.
“In his childhood and adolescence he was not effusive and he did not even like to talk a great deal, but it is was not from mistrustfulness, nor from shyness or from morose unsociability; quite the contrary it was from something else, from a sort of inner preoccupation, a preoccupation that concerned only himself and had nothing to do with anyone else, but so important to him that he seemed to forget others because of it. But he loved people; all his life he seemed to have complete faith in people and yet no one ever took him for a simpleton or a naïve person” (Dostoyevsky, 17).
It is often in this very similar “preoccupation”, that I find myself caught up in. It is these kinds of introversion I often reprimand myself for, not as a result of my own two-mindedness, but because of society. In the American society in regards to socializing, it is all talk, where always, one is expected to have something interesting to say or some comical statement. Going back to my “preoccupations”, I would not like to think myself as “mistrustful” of others, Or “shy”, or “unsociable” However, it is the label that we, even I, stick to the foreheads of those whose tongues are less free. Instead, I would like to relate myself to Alyosha, “no one would take him for a simpleton or a naïve person”. It is often because of my thoughts that I am silent.
