Asked and answered

Philosophical novel, asks and answers a large number of questions. Or rather points towards the answers as these are the truly cursed questions, the unanswerable. Ones I’ve wrestled with the larger part of life and keep asking. I wrote a poem during the reading of this, the inspiration for I had attributed to a poem by Neruda I’d come across. Perhaps it was both but I did not recognize until just now how powerful the seeds of thought here.

What to do about the absurdity of life?

The impossibility of being and thinking right and true as we would like in the moment no matter the circumstance, but only in retrospect as we wish to remember it?

How to deal with the terrible impact of some events, of our own and other people’s madness?

The meaning in the meaninglessness of life?

The problem of good and evil? This perhaps my most favorite of those tackled here. He gives a bottom up interpretation, unlike every other perhaps certainly that I’ve read anyway, of the temptations of Christ in the dessert.

I could go on.

Well over 800 pages, certainly the longest I’ve read in a long while. I’d started something of Tolstoy’s that was a similar length and didn’t like it, put it down after 50 pages or so. I am wanting to order The Possessed now, but I have so many others on the shelf still wondering when I’ll ever get to them if I keep buying more books I haven’t read yet.