Ippolit's Philosophy/impact on modern writers

[Scoundrel]

I you haven't yet read 'The Idiot', but intend to do so, you might not want to read this  


   In part 3 of The Idiot, Ippolit, the spiteful, consumptive teenager, reads a speech he had prepared and attempts to commit suicide when he’s through reading.  He says that life isn’t worth living for just a few weeks and he expresses his disgust at healthy people who take life for granted; that he can’t stand their mournful looks and unhappy expressions; “why don’t they know how to live when they have 60 years of life ahead of them?” he demands.  At one point he says that there was a case of a poor man who died of hunger.  He says that if that man could be brought back to life, he would have surely murdered him.   He rambles at length in this vein and at one point says that Columbus was not happiest when he discovered America at last, but just before he discovered it, while the men were near mutiny; and he uses that as a metaphor, drawing a parallel to everyday life saying: “it is life, life that matters, life alone—the continuous and everlasting process of discovering it—and not the discovery itself!”

   This statement reminds me so much of Jack Kerouac’s works and philosophy on life, and I was wondering if anybody else has read any of Kerouac’s works, particularly ‘On the Road’.  All his works are more or less, biographical fiction, and they tell the tale of him and his gang of friends traveling 1950’s America by way of hitchhiking, riding freights, and sometimes driving their own cars, but they always convey a great feeling of child-like, wide-eyed enthusiasm for life, and living life, and the, as Ippolit would say, continuous and everlasting process of discovering life.  So, if you haven’t read anything by Kerouac, I would highly recommend starting with On the Road or Dharma Bums.  Actually Kerouac is who initially turned me on to Dostoevsky, as he references him, or his characters more precisely, in many of his works.

[poor knight]

I appreciate your thoughtfulness about Ippolit, Scoundrel. For myself, I simply have not been able to pull myself to Kerouac, or for that matter, the Grateful Dead or Dylan, as  I think you mentioned glowingly in other posts. I am 42 (today, in fact, HBDay to me) and missed by about 10 or 15 years that era of American culture. I have found that those three artists, and their colleagues to appeal really to a small niche of people, not necessarily in size, because the baby boomers are such a large part of our population, but in age. If you are my dad's age you think those guys are all irresponsible drug addicts, and if you are my age, you think those guys are, well, all irresponsible drug addicts. I'm speaking in generalities, of course, both about "those people" and about the generation who adore them. So, absolutely no offense intended. But it is interesting how strong the appeal is to  those that lived in that era. I wonder if in thirty years, when the baby boomers are mostly gone, if the memory of those artists will be mostly gone, too.

But what I really wanted to say was that Ippolit's philosophy of the process of discovering being the great thing about life, and not the discovery itself, is really a profound insight I hadn't noticed before. I had always read Ippolit's "speech" as sort of a Demons like narrative. He more than any of the other Idiot characters reminds me of the young people in The Demons. Those with a socialist-anarchist view of life that Dostoevsky despises. All the other characters' reactions (except Myshkin's) range from disdain, to amusement to completely ignoring him. I had always thought they were proxies for FD's own reaction to this kind of thinking. But I will reread it because of that line you quoted.

It is because, there are other examples of FD using that same philosophy -- in terms of the "longing" for a thing being more important than the thing itself. Or the memory of a thing. It is a philosophy that men like CS lewis (who read  a lot of FD) have also discussed. It is the sort of thing that keeps humans always thinking a better day is around the corner. Not simply optimism, but a hunger for something just beyond our reach, for something beautiful and divine, that nothing in reality can actually quite live up to.

I don't know if Kerouac or Dylan or those types would agree, but for me it is one of  the most profoundly meaningful philosophies in my own life. Maybe that's why after reading the Idiot five times, I find, thanks to insights like yours, still something new to discover.

[Scoundrel]

             I don’t think that the memory of these artists is going anywhere, anytime soon.  For instance, I’m 22 years old and am rather enthralled by the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and, much more than them, by Jack Kerouac’s writing.  Most all the people my age that I know also hold these feelings, perhaps it’s just a product of circumstance, but young people I know certainly haven’t forgotten these legendary influences.  Aside from these trivialities, I also consider this philosophy to be rather meaningful in my life.  And you really should give Kerouac a try, it’s quality stuff.