Top 100 – Part VIII

This is the 800th post on exlibrismagnis! Every hundred posts, I’ve departed from reporting on current reading and shared some of my favorite moments from books, sections and ideas and lines that I think about often. I just went through all the previous entries in this subseries and did two things. First, I added the label “Top 100” to each of them; now you can find all the others easily in the “Labels” section at the right side of the page. (If you’re reading on a phone, you have to click “View web version” at the bottom of the page to see the “Labels” section, as well as other “gadgets.”) Second, I realized that, sure enough, I do think about all these favorite passages often.

Two or three years ago, I selected the items for today’s post. Curiously, I’ve read a couple of these books within the last twelve months and even wrote on this blog about these very moments, proving, I suppose, that I do really think about these things often.

I’ll begin with a Russian theme.

• Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: Dmitri, railing against God, asks his brother whether he (he, Alyosha, not God) could have created a world in which one little girl would be tortured for the good of the whole. For me and others, it’s the most piercing, devastating presentation of the “problem of evil”: if God is all-powerful and all-benevolent . . . . And yet human beings do torture little girls, so the question creates its dilemma partly by pushing this responsibility off on God.

• Edward Rutherfurd, Russka: One afternoon a visitor from the west visits a humble restaurant in Russia, almost nothing more than a domestic kitchen opened to the public. He asks for bread, and the woman of the house offers him the last stale heel of yesterday’s loaf. After asking if she has any fresh bread, the woman says that she doesn’t start the new loaf until the last loaf has been completely eaten. How often do you make a loaf? Every day, she says. So every day you serve a couple of slices of fresh bread in the evening and then stale bread during most of the day the next day? Yes. Why don’t you, one morning, throw out the old loaf and make a new loaf each morning? That would waste the bread. But only once, and then you could serve fresh bread all day every day from now on! Well, she finally replies, suffering is a part of life. I think of that woman every time I drink the bitter cup of coffee left in the pot overnight instead of just throwing it out, every time I hang on to a cheap, plastic mechanical pencil after the eraser end has broken. Oh, the examples are embarrassingly numerous.

• Tolstoy, Anna Karenina: Levin struggles with belief in God until he sees his baby’s face for the first time, and his doubts “blow away like dust.”

• Cervantes, Don Quixote: I mentioned this point just last month without realizing it was in my notes to talk about in no. 800. Cervantes treats two prostitutes as if they were great ladies worthy of respect. At one level, we’re supposed to believe that he’s crazy and can’t see how they’re dressed. But what does dress have to do with the dignity of the human person? I think Quixote is the sanest man in the book.

• Ariosto, Orlando Furioso: Orlando has lost his mind (over a girl not worth losing one’s mind over), so Astolfo goes to look for it. Does that sound like a joke straight out of The Phantom Tollbooth? Maybe. But it turns out that in the world of Orlando Furioso, a lost mind does indeed go somewhere. In fact, everything that is lost goes to the same place, and that place is the moon. Naturally, Astolfo searches for the legendary Prester John (who is strangely easier to find than Orlando’s lost wits), and together they ride a hippogriff to the moon to look through the landscape of discarded treasures. To me that sequence stands right at the pinnacle of fantastic creations along with the Yellow Brick Road, a snowy wood in a wardrobe, a pilotless boat covered in white samite waiting to take Galahad to the Holy Grail, and Sauron’s Eye, and perhaps surpasses them.

• Dickens, The Pickwick Papers: Just a few months ago, I mentioned Toby Weller’s contribution to the trial scene in Pickwick and said, “Trust me: it’s hilarious.” Well, in jotting down the outline of this list a few years ago, I though then that I could actually convey the humor so that you didn’t have to trust me. Now that we’ve come to it, though, I don’t think I can, but I’ll try. The Wellers have a Cockney habit of switching around V’s and W’s when they speak. “ ’e’s wery aggrawating,” one of them might say of an annoying personage. In the dock (i.e. on the stand), Sam Weller gives out his name as “Veller.” The judge asks him if he spells it with a V or a W. “Mark it down a wee, milord!” shouts his father, Toby, from the gallery. “Mark it down a wee!” Out of context, the line probably doesn’t make you crack a smile. You might not even get the joke, since it depends on my poor retelling. But I have laughed out loud many times a Toby’s eccentric understanding of the alphabet and think of that line every time a spelling issue with a V comes up.

• Dickens, Dombey and Son: Okay, I know I’ve already used up all the credit I have for retelling great jokes without the necessary context of hundreds of pages of setup. But here I go overborrowing: Captain Cuttle has a habit of quoting hodgepodges of Scripture and common aphorisms. When he realizes that the result doesn’t sound right and that he has no way of looking up the correct version easily, he turns to any handy young person in the vicinity and says, with all the airs of a great, wise professor of sacred literature, “Search the Good Book, and when found, make note of.” This is my favorite of all the Dickens books that most people haven’t heard of, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. When you read it, that joke will make you laugh. For right now, though, know that I laugh at it, and imagine how often I think of it with glee when a garbled Bible verse comes to mind and I make a resolution to look it up later.

I don’t have a plan yet for the books to talk about in my 900th post. But at the rate I’m going, I’ll have several years to work it out.