Not P but DFW on Dostoevsky

[Joseph Tracy]

Agree with Ian. Many Biblical references to the right hand, right side as the side of divine favor,  heavenly justice, truth, and lordship.

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Personal aside on Dostoevsky:
I recently read 2/3rds of the Brothers Karamozov and quit it for the same reason I quit Crime and Punishment. I just could not believe his characters or the flow of events. Too caricatured for me to relate to. I far prefer other Russian writers: Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Yevtushenko. The story line of the Idiot is genius and there may be other work I have neglected but I guess I am of the outsider opinion that Dostoevsky’s literary accolades made him sound far better than I found him as a reader.  

Thoughts on Wallace’s probings.

I think Wallace’s reasoning here, which may develop in a more nuanced direction, neglects the possiblility that Jesus like any other mystic, healer, holy person..., no matter how connected he was to divine love/insight, was in a human body and was yielding himself in nonviolent compliance to the worst of humans powers. It also neglects the motives for this compliance, which is a much more difficult an mysterous question That this is portrayed in dogma/NT scripture as equivalent to the universally redeeming sacrifice of the lamb of God may be more interpretation than the actual words or experience of this person who called himself a son of man can be lost. This is reinforced by Jesus outcry of “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  
  Also we see so many courageous souls  in human history who have challenged the fundamental violence of the power arrangements of the world and been tortured or murdered as a result. Are they not part of the redemptive  ‘body of Christ”? Is this collective heroism showing another path that might unite rather than divide people of good will? There is a mystical interpretation of these events that seems to me to treat the underlying actuality  of our human experience of the inscrutable link( some see a break rather than a link) between spirit/ eternal truth on one hand( I suppose the right/yang/light hand) and body/earthy/ mortal mind on the other( the left hand of death, transformation, birth, darkness) without leading to the trivialization of moral choice which Wallace was trying to elucidate.
  

> On Mar 30, 2023, at 8:42 AM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The following excerpt is from David Foster Wallace's Joseph Frank's
> Dostoevsky:
> 
> Even if we suppose he was divine — did he know? Did he know he could have
> broken the cross with just a word? Did he know in advance that death would
> just be temporary (because I bet I could climb up there, too, if I knew
> that an eternity of right-hand bliss lay on the other side of six hours of
> pain)?
> 
> Here he is talking about Jesus Christ. What does the word "right-hand" mean
> in "right-hand bliss"?
> --
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