Who Does Not Desire His Father

The full statement is: "Who does not desire his father's death?" It is in The Brothers Karamazov. I don't remember what character says it, and it may be that Dostoevsky says it himself rather than through the mouth of one of his creations. I think it is his most famous statement, and is considered a herald of psychoanalysis.

People don't read Dostoevsky anymore. But they don't read anything anymore as a matter of fact unless it is a titbit of text on a computer screen. Certainly people buy books, and they place them on their coffee tables, or on a desk with the title page up so visitors to their home can notice. A book is not something to actually read. Who has the time? It is an intellectual merit badge displayed as a status and identity marker. This is not to say an identity marker is not important. An identity marker is anything that establishes one's place in, or level achieved in society, for purposes of mating, procreation, and/or marriage.

So when people say, "I saw the show at the Met when I was in New York," this is as opposed to "I saw the Met's game when I was in New York." The person who would date the person who went to the Met, will not even consider talking to the person who saw the Mets. The extremely sad thing about this is that the people who go to the Met hardly look at the works there, but the people at the baseball game really care about what is going on.

But why this diversion? It is because I am about to describe my father's death, but before I do I want to say some things about Dostoevsky, since at the moment his name appears at the top of this page.

I have been reading the novels of Dostoevsky all my life. I am sure I have read all of the novels and all of the short stories at least six times. I have two daughters. One shares my love of Dostoevsky, and the other thinks I am ridiculous. One says, "After reading Dostoevsky, other writers just don't seem to have any content." The other says "Why would I read that stuff? Do you think I want to cry myself to sleep at night? Everyone is always dying."

Well, it doesn't matter, and I know that using it as a marker in my text well guarantee that my text will never become popular anywhere. It will not be read by millions of people. No, if I want to be read by millions of people I don't stand a chance unless I dedicate my life to the skills of writing about Paris Hilton, or the next Paris Hilton, and I better become damn good at it, and make some powerful friends in the media industry, because the competition would be tremendous. The lights of our entire society illuminate the actions of a few individuals, and even the uninterested cannot take their eyes away. But I write my text for one reader, and I don't know who that is!

My brother, as a child was extremely precocious, and intelligent, the opposite of myself. When I thought I would fail to get into any college, I asked for his advice. He advised me to read books constantly, on any subject, and that this would broaden my base of understanding. This was fine for him to say, he could read 1200 words a minute, and would read a book like, "War and Peace," or "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" in one day. For me to read a book took more like a month. Entering a bookstore to begin reading books, I was confronted with a daunting problem. Thousands upon thousand of books, they couldn't be equally important. Since I read so slowly, I could spend years just reading the books on one shelf, and they might all be irrelevant. What if I was to read 30 or 40 science fiction works, that would take a few years. Would I then be able to get into Harvard? I didn't think so.

The word "Classics" caught my eye and I thought perhaps if I only were to read classics that would give me sort of an advantage. So I started to read only classics. The first one was "Crime and Punishment."