League of Inveterate Poets

By Mark Traphagen on December 2, 2009

The Brothers Karamazov is my bathroom reading right now (whatever I have on the Stanza e-reader app on my iPhone). Some of you know that I’m having a colonoscopy this afternoon, so have been on two days of fasting and laxative bombs. Just throwing that in to let you know I’ve had a lot of reading time these past couple of days.

I ran across this passage where the narrator is talking about a young man of great intelligence and academic potential who has just decided to enter a monastery:

“…he was to some extent a youth of our last epoch–that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.”

I tried my hand and mind at the sacrifice of “tedious study” for five years of seminary. Very glad I did it, but it also revealed that it was not to be my life’s sacrifice. So I offer this as a salute to my wife and our many friends who continue to offer up their “seething youth” to “multiply…their powers of serving truth.”