Today is my birthday!
It’s also Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s (spelling?) birthday, apparently.
I found out that I share a birthday with the Crime and Punishment guy when I ran across this STARTLING image tagged as “Dostoyevsky’s birthday” on my Tumblr feed.
Personally, I’ve never read a Dostoy boy book.
I do have Crime and Punishment sitting on my book shelf, however. It looks nice there.
But the above image / quotation got me thinking: Are people with “large hearts” and “big intelligence” always sad?
That seems needlessly pessimistic on face value but seems maybe somewhat true when you think about how many good ‘sad’ books there are versus how many good ‘happy’ books there are.
But I don’t know. The more I reread the quotation, the more I think it’s just reductive and wrong.
Like, okay, people with big brains inevitably experience pain and suffering, but doesn’t literally everyone inevitably experience pain and suffering? And why must the ‘really great men’ (who are they? I’d like to ask Fyodor) have great sadness on [E]arth? Because they’re sooooo smart, they can’t find a way to be happy?
It seems to me that part of being smart is ‘being able to be happy / not being inevitably greatly sad.’
I am annoyed when ‘great men’ seem to ‘get off’ on being despairing.
Despairing is not sweet.
Whence this tie between intellectual merit and pain?
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