The Rosy Crucifixion 3 - Nexus Read Free Page B

creature, one has doubts about his wife’s exceptional ability to love, what then? Supposing the husband has reason to believe that there is a mixture of sham and reality connected with this extraordinary gift for love? That to prepare her husband, to condition him, as it were, she slyly and insidiously struggles to poison his mind, invents or concocts the most fantastic tales, all innocent, of course, about experiences with girl friends prior to her marriage. Never openly admitting that she slept with them, but implying it, insinuating, always insinuating, that it could have been so. And the moment the husband … me, in other words … registers fear or alarm, she violently denies anything of the sort, insists that it must be one’s imagination which invoked the picture … Do you follow me? Or is it getting too complicated?
    She sat down, her face suddenly grave. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me searchingly. Suddenly she broke into a smile, a Satanic sort of smile, and exclaimed: So this is your game! Now you want to poison my mind! With this the tears gushed forth and she took to sobbing.
    As luck would have it, Mona arrived in the very thick of it.
    What are you doing to her? Her very first words. Putting an arm around poor Stasia, she stroked her hair, comforted her with soothing words.
    Touching scene. A little too genuine, however, for me to be properly moved.
    The upshot—Stasia must not attempt to go home. She must stay and get a good night’s rest.
    Stasia looks at me questioningly.
    Of course, of course! I say. I wouldn’t turn a dog out on a night like this..
    The weirdest part of the scene, as I look back on it, was Stasia’s turn out in a soft, filmy night-gown. If only she had had a pipe in her mouth, it would have been perfect.
    To get back to Feodor … They got me itchy sometimes with their everlasting nonsense about Dostoievsky. Myself, I have never pretended to understand Dostoievsky. Not all of him, at any rate. (I know him, as one knows a kindred soul.) Nor have I read all of him, even to this day. It has always been my thought to leave the last few morsels for death-bed reading. I am not sure, for instance, whether I read his Dream of the Ridiculous Man or heard tell about it. Neither am I at all certain that I know who Marcion was, or what Marcionism is. There are many things about Dostoievsky, as about life itself, which I am content to leave a mystery. I like to think of Dostoievsky as one surrounded by an impenetrable aura of mystery. For example, I can never picture him wearing a hat—such as Swedenborg gave his angels to wear. I am, moreover, always fascinated to learn what others have to say about him, even when their views make no sense to me. Only the other day I ran across a note I had jotted down in a notebook. Probably from Berdyaev. Here it is: After Dostoievsky man was no longer what he had been before. Cheering thought for an ailing humanity.
    As for the following, certainly no one but Berdyaev could have written this: In Dostoievsky there was a complex attitude to evil. To a large extent it may look as though he was led astray. On the one hand, evil is evil, and ought to be exposed and must be burned away. On the other hand, evil is a spiritual experience of man. It is man’s part. As he goes on his way man may be enriched by the experience of evil, but it is necessary to understand this in the right way. It is not the evil itself that enriches him; he is enriched by that spiritual strength which is aroused in him for the overcoming of evil. The man who says I will give myself up to evil for the sake of the enrichment never is enriched; he perishes. But it is evil that puts man’s freedom to the test…
    And now one more citation (from Berdyaev again) since it brings us one step nearer to Heaven…
    The Church is not the Kingdom of God; the Church has appeared in history and it has acted in history; it does not mean the transfiguration of the world, the appearance