without notice; and it comes with the desire to take note of the world and its impressions in vivid detail. His fear of death makes him see the world anew, and he falls in love with it like a child feeling grass for the first time. 10 Dostoevsky, like Prince Myshkin, was saved. A messenger appeared on a foaming horse: the czar had granted a pardon. The near-death experience (what's now believed to have been a mock execution, a revelation with its own implications) had lifelong effects on Dostoevsky. His epilepsy worsened, he abandoned his political idealism, and he became deeply introspective. Most significantly, it invigorated him to look afresh at the world and to question, relentlessly, life's meaning. The execution scene casts its shadow over many places in his work. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, contemplating suicide, thinks: "Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!" This sentiment-"Life, whatever it may be!"- has haunted me for nearly twenty years. As is only fitting, memory hasn't kept the particulars of where I was when I first encountered the passage, but it must've been while riding the Number Six after a day of classes. I would've taken the sentences in and looked up for a moment of meditation. Perhaps the bus turned, just then, north onto Dayton or 10
In 1996, I met for coffee with a depressed friend who I hoped wasn't contemplating suicide. I asked him whether he'd ever experienced instances (I had no term for them then) when life felt more exciting, more charged with meaning. He had. We talked about Dostoevsky and Raskolnikov's hypothetical ledge (to be considered in the next three paragraphs). Years later I discovered Virginia Woolf's testimony that it doesn't have to be imminent death bringing such intensity of awareness. Even mundane tasks like a walk in the country can incite what she called a "moment of being" in which a person feels, suddenly, the vividness of the experience, consciousness, and a connectedness to the world's larger patterns. Much more common, of course, are moments of non-being, the unconscious living of daily life-and it was the apparent meaninglessness of the majority of his experience (his habitualization to life), I can see now, that weighed so heavily on my friend. Update: he's still alive; I had coffee with him a few months ago.
THE SCAFFOLD AND THE PAlACE I 119