Great Books and Love: Taking an Axe to the Frozen Sea Inside Us

What Fyodor Dostoevsky Can Teach Us About Love

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Franz Kafka once said that the experience of reading great books should be like taking an axe to the frozen sea inside us. The Brothers Karamazov did that for me. Several times, actually.

In fact, I was so strongly taken by one particular passage from Dostoevsky’s classic book on free will and morality that I started writing under the name Matt Karamazov.

It’s a different passage that I want to bring to your attention today, but my life was never the same after reaching Book VI, Chapter 2, when Father Zossima’s brother, Merkel, tells their mother:

“…do not weep, life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the world over.”

Of course, life also involves an unbelievable amount of suffering and hardship, and it doesn’t always seem like a paradise to me. One of my best friends, Mike, just died a few weeks ago (26 years old, didn’t know that he had diabetes, slipped into a diabetic coma), and I know that eventually, either I am going to lose everyone I’ve ever cared about, or I’m going to be lost to them. Some paradise. What kind of world forces you into tradeoffs like that?