I am sitting on my sofa with the window open, listening to the wind outside. There is no music playing. London was hot this summer. Now it is autumn, and the air has changed. It enters the room cool and forceful, lifting the curtain and bending the flames of the candles before passing further inside. Usually, music follows me from room to room and fills the spaces between one part of the day and the next. I work to it, cook to it, cycle to it and write to it. I have always trusted music to find the feeling before I have found the words. Yet tonight I do not want a song.
Perhaps this is what I want from the evening: not silence exactly, but the absence of interpretation. A song can alter the meaning of a room. It can lend tenderness to what was merely sad, dignity to what was painful and beauty to things that did not earn it. Music gathers scattered moments and arranges them into a story, often before we have decided whether the story is true. The wind is less persuasive. It arrives without explanation and leaves without conclusion. It touches the trees, the curtain, the candle flames, and for a moment everything moves together. Then the room settles, unchanged but somehow clearer.
Recently, I have been reading The Idiot by Dostoevsky, one of the few books by him that I did not read at school. This evening, with the candles lit and the autumn air moving through the room, I read another chapter. Then I placed the book beside me and began to write this note. Myshkin had followed me out of the chapter. Perhaps certain books wait for us to acquire the questions with which they must be read. I am not usually drawn deeply into fiction, but this one feels less like a story I am observing and more like a mind I recognise. Even the book itself has become part of the pleasure. Its pages have a warm, quiet smell that I find calming. Every so often I lift it closer to my face and breathe it in.
There was one long night in August when I found myself in a room I could not leave, with only a book from the world outside. I read it aloud, not because the words required a voice, but because I did. When I could read no longer, I held it against me and slept. It made me feel less alone and a little safer. It reminded me who I was.
Dostoevsky described his intention as attempting to portray a “wholly beautiful individual.” Myshkin is not an idiot. Not to me, at least. I have not yet finished the book, so perhaps I will change my mind before the final page. For now, his simplicity does not seem like emptiness, nor his openness a failure to perceive what is happening around him. He often understands people more clearly than they understand themselves. What others mistake for foolishness is his refusal to participate in the small cruelties and calculations by which they protect themselves. There is what Dostoevsky calls a “boundless truthfulness” in him. I think Myshkin knows that others consider him naive, but appearing clever, in the narrow sense most people understand cleverness, is simply not his ambition. He does not need to disguise what he is just to prove that he understands the disguise.
Earlier today, when I refused to tell a lie for someone, she told me that sometimes we have to lie if we want a better life. I understood what she meant. A small lie can smooth a difficult surface, preserve an arrangement and make life temporarily easier. But I cannot build a better life by becoming less truthful inside it. I know that my refusal is impractical, but I can live with that. In a world accustomed to disguise, people like Myshkin are often called idiots. But are they? Or have we simply become so fluent in calculation that truthfulness looks like a failure to understand?
Yet Dostoevsky does not offer goodness as an easy answer. Myshkin instinctively searches for the injured person beneath the injury they cause. Once he understands someone’s wounds, he finds it difficult to act as though they do not matter. His compassion becomes inseparable from his sense of responsibility, and his understanding of suffering makes judgement feel almost like cruelty. He offers compassion without sufficient protection for himself. He tries to preserve everyone, to abandon no one, to answer pain with patience. His tragedy is not that he fails to see what people are capable of. It is that he sees it, sees also what has made them capable of it, and cannot decide which truth should govern him.
A friend recently invited me to imagine goodness as a small collection of jewels. Each time we give something of ourselves away, he said, there is one less jewel left in our hands. Then he asked me what I was prepared to lose for another person. My freedom? My dignity? My life? And, most importantly, for whom? I resisted the metaphor at first because I do not believe goodness is diminished by being given. But perhaps goodness is not what runs out. The things we sacrifice in its name do. Freedom can be lost. Dignity can be surrendered. A life can end. The question is not only how much love or compassion we possess, but whether the person receiving them has any right to their cost.
Dostoevsky places a beautiful nature in a world that knows how to exploit beauty and asks whether innocence can survive there. His answer is not reassuring. Myshkin’s goodness does not transform the people around him, at least not in the chapters I have read so far.
I am beginning to realise that there is an imbalance in human attachments. The people who handle our hearts carefully often require the least patience from us, while those who handle them carelessly can receive the most. Respect asks for little interpretation. It allows affection to remain affection and an ending to remain an ending, without forcing either person to argue for the value of what existed. Carelessness is more demanding. It leaves questions that refuse to remain answered and sends the mind back through old conversations in search of the missing piece that might make everything coherent. We can find ourselves offering the greatest understanding precisely where understanding changes nothing.
Like Myshkin, some people instinctively search for the injured person beneath the injury they cause. Once another person’s wounds become visible, it is difficult to behave as though they do not matter. We may explain away what we see because compassion makes the alternative painful, or begin to believe that understanding places a moral duty upon us. Yet an explanation does not alter the nature of what it explains. To understand the origins of someone’s behaviour is not to become responsible for its consequences. Compassion may allow us to see a person whole, but it does not require us to remain within reach of everything they choose to do.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky writes, “Above all, don’t lie to yourself.” His warning is not merely against dishonesty, but against the private story a person creates to escape responsibility for what he has done. If he listens to that story for long enough, Dostoevsky suggests, he eventually loses the ability to distinguish truth within himself or anywhere around him. He can cause harm and then rearrange events until he becomes misunderstood, provoked or even injured himself. He may invent an offence, exaggerate it for effect and repeat it until imagined injury hardens into genuine hostility. The lie need not convince anyone else. It only needs to protect him from the knowledge of what he has done.
Dostoevsky’s instruction applies equally to those on the receiving end, although there the lie takes a different form. Another person’s pain, history, fear and perhaps even tenderness can be placed carefully around the harm they caused. Compassion makes every explanation feel humane. Music can help too, giving sorrow a shape and casting beauty over what might be harder to face without it. Perhaps that is why I do not want a song tonight. I do not want anything making the truth more bearable than it should be. Sometimes the truest act of compassion is to see the prior wound and the present injury together, without allowing one to erase the other. Above all, the lie must not become beautiful enough to pass for truth.
Now, the candles. I bought them today simply because I wanted them. This should not feel significant, but somehow it does. I was raised not to prioritise myself or to indulge in things merely for the pleasure of having them. Anything bought only for me had to be useful, deserved or capable of being shared. There is no occasion tonight and nobody expected. I lit the candles anyway. I am looking at them now. Their scent is heavenly, and there is something deeply soothing about watching the flames. Perhaps care begins more simply than I had imagined, with allowing myself something pleasant without first having to justify it. They make the room nicer. That is good enough.
The window is still open and the candles are burning. In a moment, I will post this note and return to Myshkin, who sees too much to condemn people easily, but not always enough to leave them to the consequences of what he sees. I will read until I am ready to sleep. I have not yet decided who the idiot is: Myshkin, for refusing to play the games the rest of us have learned to play; the rest of us, for calling him one; or me, for assuming there can be only one answer. Tonight, I will leave the music off. A song can make an answer feel like mine before it truly is.
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