This is the first internet meme I remember seeing. I laughed so hard I probably watched it twenty-five times in a row. One of the more modest accomplishments of my life is that I can honestly say I have never destroyed a computer in a rage, though I’ve come close thousands of times. I even banged on a computer that was stalling hard enough that afterward it would randomly, instantly shut down mid-session without warning. Even so, I’m sure there are people who have come still closer than I have to destroying their computers.
I have, however, thrown phones across rooms several dozen times in my life. I never broke them completely, but I did once come so close that the phone would only work after I duct-taped it together. I’ve thrown glasses, full ones, against walls and floors. I’ve slammed doors hard enough to break the hinges. When I was fourteen I tore a painting off the wall and broke the class frame into thousands of pieces. When I was sixteen I nearly ran over two classmates with my car. As an adolescent I tore books from their shelves, set fire to pieces of paper, and once threatened someone with a knife. I’ve yelled so many times in my life that I’m surprised I still have a singing voice. I’ve neither provoked nor been provoked into a physical altercation since I was a college freshman, but I probably got well over a hundred before that. More often than not it was picked on me, but far more times than I’d like to admit, I picked it on them.
Imagine, at least if you care to, what it’s like to be diagnosed as a depressive at the age of eight, as I was. A third of your childhood, the third you have no trouble remembering, has been stolen from you. Days which should be spent in the happy ignorance of the adult trials that await are spent in the throes of the worst emotions with which life can bequeath at any age, and there is as yet no part of you which understands how to view the awfulness of what may come in proportion to its merit. There is only the ineradicable sense that life is an unremitting agony, constructed for the sole purpose of tormenting you alone.
And yet it’s not the childhood years which I remember with horror, I must reserve that for adolescence. The realization that other people did bad things to you is ultimately forgivable and in some cases can be remembered with a certain black humor. But what can never be totally forgiven is the moments when you acted badly towards others, because each of us must live with the choices we make. I don’t know precisely when it was, but there was a moment when I awakened to an almost inarticulable realization that life perpetrated a terrible injustice on me, and I had no idea whom to blame for it; so I blamed everyone. To this day, it shames me to say that whatever evil was done to me, I repaid the debt to the best of my ability in a thousand ways. And in my still too frequent lowest moments, it is not what was done to me which I remember, but what I did to others. There are worse things in life than knowing that other people’s sins are on your head, and one of them is knowing that you did not turn the other cheek.
Today, we read about another young man who opened fire in a crowded area simply so he could kill people. Every time we read about a new adolescent killer, I do have to wonder…how close did I come at that point in my life? How close did other angry kids I knew come? The truth is, probably, not very; most adolescents have rage in them which they cannot articulate, and sometimes that rage is truly black. But was there really that big a difference between Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold and myself?
The reasons the Columbine massacre happened are extremely complicated; a confluence of too easy access to weapons, righteous anger, bullying, a culture of violence, family pressure, ignorant faculty, and (primarily) sociopathy. It takes an extremely fragile combination to provoke the correct chain reaction to result in a massacre. But frankly, if it hadn’t been the two of them, it might have just as easily been fifty-thousand other young adults that year, perhaps even a hundred kids I knew, or me. The fact that some angry kids outgrow their rage and progress to a fruitful maturity while others remain forever remembered as murderers may be simple luck.
But luck is never simple; it’s a relative term. I’ve been lucky to outgrow this adolescence into a reasonably content adulthood, with many good friends and a family that loves me. But perhaps a truly lucky person would never have undergone those dark years I did.
I freely admit, in the worst moments my temper is still the absolute poison it ever was. In order to keep it in check, I have to keep myself on guard every day of my life. When the alternative remains crippling depression or horrendous panic attacks, anger can seem like the best of all possible options. But aggression puts the pain which you feel onto others, and at least sadness does not transfer the blame for your lot onto innocent bystanders. If I have a surfeit of loyal friends, I don’t doubt that it’s because to an extent that surprises even me I’ve learned to shield my worst moments from them. Those moments certainly still exist, but to the maximum extent I can help, no one shall ever see them but me. Sadly, I have not yet learned how to shield many of those moments from my family to nearly the same extent. I pray that the day I can will come very soon.
(Part of why Crimes and Misdemeanors is an over-rated movie is that this is actually not a bad definition of comedy.)
When you live knowing you have faults like these, and I suspect more people have similar ones than would ever like to admit so, what is there to do about it except to confess your faults and open yourself to the ridicule to which people would subject you anyway if they ever saw you act so stupidly? I have yet to meet a person better at self-deprecation than me (how’s that for an egotistical statement?), and for many years it’s been the best weapon I have to ingratiate myself. Some people can live their lives in blissful unawareness of their own ridiculousness – others have to embrace their inner clown head on. The anger which once coursed through me so viciously through my insides is now something I wear on the outside, a court jester’s outfit – ready at a second’s turn to do something outrageous.
(try telling me this wouldn’t be awesome…)
For three years, I’ve been trying to finish every page of The Brothers Karamazov – that great and greatly flawed novel among novels which my uncle gave to me as a present while I lived with him in Israel. I haven’t quite finished it for a couple reasons – some having to do with aesthetic concerns. But fundamentally, the biggest problem I have with this book is that it is far too great to not hit far too close to home. At heart, this is a book about a father and his four sons. When I first read it, I couldn’t help seeing parallels with myself and my relationships to my Dad and brothers. But as I got further, I began to perceive that every character in this family is me: Dimitri the well-meaning hot-head is me, Ivan the intellectual whose nihilism drives him insane is me, Smerdyakov whose meanness hides a lifetime of terrible experiences is me, even Alyosha the saint who forgoes his own desires in an effort to be compassionate to the sufferings of others can be me. But even the character who I thought could never be me is me.
If there was one thing in this book of which I was sure as I was reading, it was that the boys’ father, Fyodor Karamazov, was my Dad: nature’s provocateur; always doing what he could to be the center of attention, always trying to find the most outrageous thing to say, always trying to shake up people’s self-conceptions, picking at their insecurities and inflaming their resentments for his own entertainment; playing the part of the fool so as to mask a great intelligence, and so as better to make others uncomfortable. In my least charitable moments, this was how I always viewed my Dad, and here was an image of him staring directly at me from the page.
Yet that does my father as much a disservice to much else that he is as any description could. As a bookworm and as my father’s son, I must say that this description neither does justice to Fyodor’s evilness or to Dad’s goodness. In fact, if this comparison were in any way made seriously to either Dad or a real life Fyodor Karamazov, it would be incredibly insulting. And if anything, at this point Fyodor Karamazov is a better representation of my personality than my Dad’s.
If Dostoevsky can create a family of five such characters, all of whom resonate so clearly within the same person, then clearly the book’s clearest insight is that we all have emotional beasts of burden; demons carried within us which gnaw as painfully as any cancer, and which will only fester without a proper outlet. Each of the Karamazovs is a part of us, carrying that same demon around which we all have and each trying to find a proper outlet for it.
Perhaps these next questions get us off the hook a bit too easily, but are there really demonic (or even evil) things within us, or are what we see as our demons simply misdirected passion? The will to live life intensely is there in us all, but if we’re (relatively) lucky, we can direct that will towards something that helps others, or at least doesn’t hurt them. I’m not a person given to quoting Bertrand Russell (and I read this quote in a classical CD review) but there is one by him which I love: “Nothing great is achieved without passion, but underneath the passion there should always be that large impersonal survey which sets limits to actions that our passions inspire.” Some people have ready-made ways to be passionate, and find hobbies and passions which so inspire them that they feel at peace with themselves, utterly contented by what they do. I want to beat the shit out of such people.
Because no matter how much misanthropy and vengeful feeling is inspired by depression, anger, and anxiety, it is not bad feeling which inspires such terrible emotions. It is good feeling. It is the knowledge that somewhere, there is the possibility of a better life which we seem unable to lead. It is not a hatred for life that inspires black feeling, it is love of life.
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