What the Hell is This?

Once upon a time, when I was too young to have any defense or response, I was kicked out of the vacant lot where my brother and his friends played softball.

Curious about the game that was about to start, I ventured up to the umpire, a freckled boy older than my brother, and not from our neighborhood. He whirled around and hissed at me (squinting, in Disney-movie-mean-boy fashion) to get outta here, get lost.

“You’re too little,” he spat contemptuously.

For no other reason than my complete vulnerability (I was three or four), this stranger’s scornful assessment filled me with overwhelming, all-consuming shame. He had exposed my inadequacy to everyone; inadequacy that I had been until then unaware of, which was only more proof of my stupidity. I ran home, hiccuping with violent sobs, and threw myself into the green vinyl chair in our TV room. I can still remember the feel of the garish 1970s afghan that covered it, the rough texture scratching against my wet cheek.

This minor interaction really shouldn’t matter anymore. Except that it took root in my body, like a tangle of vines growing inside my ribcage, squeezing my heart. The cells themselves seemed to form a memory of this powerful sensation, and every time I experienced myself as defective or less-than, it became stronger. How could I be so stupid? How could I have ever considered myself an equal, when I was (for reasons that were not always clear to me) so thoroughly inferior? It was as if the Big Kids were still on the desired side, and incompetent little AlienBaby was always on the other.

I vividly remember this happening again when I walked into the youth minister’s office at my church and found the boy with whom I was completely infatuated (and with whom I had hoped to go to prom) holding hands with my good friend Katy. She had somehow neglected to mention to me their newfound puppy love. The feeling of humiliation was total and sweeping, and this time there was nowhere to run — no green chair to hide in.

…

I wouldn’t have believed that other people experienced this feeling so intensely also, or that it could make others likewise want to disappear into nothingness, if it hadn’t been for certain authors, notably Dostoevsky. Few writers have approached his ability to comprehend and recreate the squirm-inducing scenarios that attend and feed the shame of perceiving oneself as less-than, laughable, ridiculous. And even fewer do it with his depth of understanding or his compassion. Part of the author’s greatness, I believe, is his great love for the flawed and flailing human being, a love that treats his characters more kindly than they treat themselves (or one another, quite frequently).

…

One example is the dialogue between fourteen-year-old Kolya Krassotkin and monastery novice Alyosha Karamazov in the “Precocity” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. Kolya was immediately painfully familiar to me as a wannabe intellectual, lying about his familiarity with Voltaire and other philosophical novelists, talking a big talk, trying to bluff his way into respectability. (For my part, I’ve pretended to know what the hell Jacques Derrida was all about — having only seen a movie about his life! — and faked knowledge of bands like Neutral Milk Hotel or the Magnetic Fields, just to appear cooler and “in the know.”) Here’s a rather obnoxious excerpt from Kolya’s convoluted and pretentious ramblings:

But please don’t suppose I am such a revolutionist…Though I mention (Byelinsky’s character) Tatyana, I am not at all for the emancipation of women. I acknowledge that women are a subject race and must obey. Les femmes tricottent, as Napoleon said…and on that question at least I am quite of one mind with that pseudo-great man. I think, too, that to leave one’s country and fly to America is mean, worse than mean — silly. Why go to America when one may be of great service to humanity here? There’s a perfect mass of fruitful activity open to us…I must own, they’ve been at me to go (to America), but I declined. That’s between ourselves, of course, Karamazov; do you hear, not a word to any one. I say this only to you. I am not at all anxious to fall into the clutches of the secret police and take lessons at the Chain bridge,

‘Long will you remember
The house at the Chain bridge.’

Do you remember? It’s splendid. Why are you laughing? You don’t suppose I am fibbing, do you?

Here the author parenthetically gives us a window into Kolya’s mind:

(“What if he should find out that I’ve only that one number of The Bell in father’s bookcase, and haven’t read any more of it?” Kolya thought with a shudder.)

He is deathly afraid of being exposed as an incompetent child, a fraud. (Aren’t we all?)

Alyosha gently calls Kolya on his transparent ploy, noting that Kolya has a “charming nature” that has been “distorted,” saying that he is in fact “very sensitive.” In recognizing this, he unleashes an emotional torrent from the anxious boy:

…When I was fancying you had a great contempt for me for being in such a hurry to show off…for a moment I quite hated you for it, and began talking like a fool. Then I fancied — just now, here — when I said that if there were no God he would have to be invented, that I was in too great a hurry to display my knowledge, especially as I got that phrase out of a book. But I swear I wasn’t showing off out of vanity, although I really don’t know why…Oh, Karamazov, I am profoundly unhappy. I sometimes fancy all sorts of things, that every one is laughing at me, the whole world, and then I feel ready to overturn the whole order of things.

“Tell me,” he asks, “am I very ridiculous now?”

Alyosha responds passionately:

Don’t think about that, don’t think of it at all! And what does ridiculous mean? Isn’t everyone constantly being or seeming ridiculous? Besides, nearly all clever people now are fearfully afraid of being ridiculous, and that makes them unhappy. All I am surprised at is that you should be feeling that so early, though I’ve observed it for some time past, and not only in you. Nowadays the very children have begun to suffer from it. It’s almost a sort of insanity…

He goes on to reassure Kolya and commend him for his candor.

You are like every one else…that is, like very many others. Only you must not be like everybody else, that’s all…you be the only one not like it. You really are not like every one else, here you are not ashamed to confess to something bad and even ridiculous. And who will admit so much in these days?

…

Apparently even in nineteenth-century Russia, amid political and social turmoil and widespread poverty, people were driven by the same psychological needs and fears as we are in affluent twenty-first century America. How could I be so stupid? The shame and the fear of exposure as ultimately inferior and laughable is perhaps universal to human beings, and not just a luxury for the idle rich.

The way Alyosha effectively disarms this powerful motivating force is by identifying it, not with sharp criticism or venom, but with lovingkindness. He gives Kolya a safe space in which to let down his already considerable defenses. And the walls come a-tumblin’ down.

At the end of this exchange a bashful Kolya observes, “Do you know, Karamazov, our talk has been like a declaration of love.” He no longer has to fear being or seeming ridiculous, at least not with Alyosha.

What a different world we might live in, if we could all give one another that safe space.