Don't Be "The Idiot"!

“The Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoevsky is one the first novels I have read and to my recollection, the best one. Early in the novel, in the middle of a conversation, Prince Myshkin (the main character) says:

“…I believe that so thoroughly, that I say bluntly: To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Killing by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than killing by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood, or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute. There have been instances when a man has still hoped for escape, running or begging for mercy after his throat was cut. But in the other case all that last hope, which makes dying ten times as easy, is taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible. You may lead a soldier out and set him facing the canon in the battle and fire at him and he’ll still hope; but read a sentence of certain death over that same soldier, and he will go out of his mind or burst into tears.”

People who have read the novel are aware of the fate awaiting such a character; a man who values hope so much that he considers death penalty “incomparably worse” than the murder itself! He likes to see human beings – instead of accepting death – living their life to their last breath negligent of their death. Of course – as the title of the novel is telling us – he is “The Idiot” and as Forough Farrokhzad (an Iranian poet and film director) once wrote “Idiotically thinks he has the right to live”:

“Forgive her

her who every once in a while

forgets her existence’s painful bond

with stagnant waters

and empty holes

and idiotically thinks

she has the right to live

Forgive her

the indifferent anger of a photograph

which in its paper eyes

the faraway wish for motion turns into water”^۱

Life is a brief and painful opportunity to accept and demand death; let’s not waste it by being negligent of our death:

“By Allah, the son of Abu Talib has more affection for death than an infant for the breast of its mother.” (Imam Ali, Nahj al-Balagha, Sermon 5)

۱. Translated into English by me, from a poem called “Forgive Her”