TRTR Chapter 6 - hosting apologia / initial quotation

[Jed Kelestron]

The enigma od scient insects, devils, sacred hearts, and beauty:

More flies in the holy water.

>From BK:

But enough poetry! I am in tears; let me cry. It may be foolishness
that everyone would laugh at. But you won't laugh. Your eyes are
shining, too. Enough poetry. I want to tell you now about the insects
to whom God gave 'sensual lust.'

               To insects -- sensual lust.

I am that insect, brother, and it is said of me specially. All we
Karamazovs are such insects, and, angel as you are, that insect lives
in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests,
because sensual lust is a tempest worse than a tempest! Beauty is a
terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been
fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but
riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by
side. I am a cultivated man, brother, but I've thought a lot about
this. It's terrible what mysteries there are! Too many riddles weigh
men down on earth. We must solve them as we can, and try to keep a dry
skin in the water. Beauty! I can't endure the thought that a man of
lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends
with the ideal of Sodom. What's still more awful is that a man with
the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the
Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on
fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. Yes, man is broad,
too broad, indeed. I'd have him narrower. The devil only knows what to
make of it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to
the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense
mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret?
The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God
and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of
man. But a man always talks of his own ache. Listen, now to come to
facts.