Ashes, ashes, we all fall down

February 13, 2013
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down

Ash Wednesday. When we repent of our sins and think for forty days we can do without, at least one or two of them.

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In the last chapter of the first part of Oblomov, however Ilya Ilyich idealizes aspects of his childhood, he is less sorrowful that he is no longer a child than he is indifferent to having become a man.

Among those things we are indifferent to in our childhood are the days and the weeks and the months, for we live in the seasons and to and from the great feasts and festivals − family birthdays, Christmas, Easter, when the pool opens and closes. We are largely indifferent to the world outside our world; we don’t imagine that anyone − except in books − lives any differently from the way we do. And since there is no reason to envy anyone in a book, there is nothing to be envious of. We are indifferent to the nature of the world we live in, for we have conceded the mystery of it: how birds fly and trees get and lose their leaves, how snow falls and rises again − “the air and water and forest and field [are all] alike under the sway of the supernatural,” as Oblomov says. So are our friends, the heroes of fairy tales, legends, the Bible. So are we.

Then!  

          Goncharov suggests that sadness will come, when we realize that the world is “ordered according to a simple plan” − the moon is not cheese and the sun is not butter; Thor does not hammer out thunder, Zeus does not scatter the lightning; the dead will not rise; giants will be imprisoned in side-shows and imps confined to circus tents. The year will be divided into months and the months into weeks and the weeks into days. Each day will have twenty-four hours. Each hour − and each minute − will have a number.

          The child’s world is not so easily measured, it wanders; but the daze in which it roams − or floats − does not confuse but delights.

Then!  

          We put away childish things. We foreswear confusion. And we lose our knack for delight. That, at least, is what my mother thought without thinking; it is what she taught me without my learning it.

 W