MOMENTS IN TIME : JANUARY 1, 2000

A REFLECTION

Sometimes memories return to me with uncanny clarity. It is not just the clarity that strikes me. More often I wonder why certain memories return to me so long after the event. After all, of all the things I have experienced in my life, why would one day's details suddenly reemerge? What triggered it? And then a more vexing thought crosses my mind: As clear as my memory seems to me, perhaps reality was very different from what I remember? Who can say now? That is one reason why memory fascinates me so much. It is exquisitely subjective. It seems real, but only to ourselves.

I got up this morning and suddenly remembered December 31, 1999. On that day, I worked from morning to night and beyond. Back then, I was a 22-year-old kid with a "bowl haircut" and a jean jacket. I wore ripped $30 pants for days at a time. I was a college senior who memorized Nietzsche quotes without fully comprehending them. I basically had no money; my mother gave me about $20 a week to spend. So starting in 1997 I worked as a DJ to make a few extra bucks. Much to my good fortune, I met a much older guy named Joe who had been DJ'ing parties around the city for decades. He used to tell me stories about going home with women after disco parties in the 1970s. He was a Vietnam veteran and--to be kind--rather eccentric. He lived alone in a food-strewn apartment on 122nd Street brimming with records and 5 or 6 yappy Chihuahuas (one or two died over the years; but a few more were born, so I can't remember the exact number). Basically, the place was squalid. But somehow Joe kept getting gigs and holding his life together really well. He kept a zillion post-it notes all over his bedroom to remind him to do this and that each day--and he always got it done. For years, we worked really well together. He farmed me out to jobs he couldn't do and I gave him a cut of what I made. Plus we became really good friends.

Both Joe and I knew that New Year's Eve on Y2K would be a gangbuster night for DJ's. After all, everyone was partying that night. Some people thought the world was going to end. I knew it wouldn't. But it was an unprecedented atmosphere. And most importantly, entertainers like us were in demand that night. So we could charge huge fees and we knew people would pay. We could name our price for a change.

Joe wound up scheduling a $2000 job. At the same time, he booked me a job for $1800. We agreed I would get $1500. He would take a $300 commission. That seemed fair to me; in fact, I was thrilled. For a kid who wore torn pants and got $20 a week to spend, $1500 was a treasure trove. I could live the whole semester on that--and all for just one night's work.

I remember the job exactly. We did it in a brand new loft apartment on 21st Street near 6th Avenue. Some nouveau riche woman and her husband were throwing a party. Joe and I drove down to the apartment the morning before the gig to set up. Joe drove a virtually unroadworthy mid-80s Chevy station wagon. It had no muffler and a pretty disgusting, food-like crust clung like a glaze all over the interior. The car had roaches. And Joe stuffed in so many speakers, wires, amps and record crates into it that I was amazed the bumper didn't scrape the pavement as we drove. In short, despite all appearances, Joe was a master of limited space management. The cops never pulled the jalopy over, either.

I remember schlepping all our equipment two flights up to the apartment. The woman and her husband were frantically decorating the place and setting up long tables for the hors d'oeuvres. I had a few words with her. She said she liked hip-hop and R&B. I said that was great because "that was my specialty." She seemed to like me. She didn't seem to like Joe too much, though. After all, at first glance he looked really gruff and he spent his time hauling speakers and wires all over the place. He was always polite and even charming. But he just didn't look the part. Some customers really used to treat him badly, and that hurt me.

After we set up the equipment, Joe and I sat in the car for a few minutes and talked about the plan for the evening. I would show up at the gig and do my thing. He would go to his gig and do his. Then he would pick me up from my gig and I would give him his cut. We would drive back uptown together and call it a night around 4 AM. It was a good plan. We then went our separate ways.

I remember the party went very smoothly. I got to play the music I wanted. The crowd was easy and did not complain. My DJ station faced east; the crowd looked west out the windows over 6th Avenue. Joe set up the lights and I controlled them with a little hand console. It took a while for the alcohol to get the party moving; eventually it did. I started off playing 70s funk and rare grooves. That gave a nice ambiance to the early part. Later, people started asking me to play hip-hop and assorted Top Ten pop. I obliged. I remember one Asian chick kept asking me to play Lauren Hill's "That Thing" over and over again. That tune always generated a huge crowd response, so I waited to play it until the place was really hopping. I kept telling her "it was in the pipe." She never quarreled with me; she just kept going back to her friends and dancing.

Before midnight, nervous excitement came over the room. People started wondering aloud whether the world would end at 12:01. I remember people throwing their drinks and hooting in the minutes leading up to midnight. I also remember looking outside and seeing helicopters flying low over the city with spotlights on. There was a lot of honking and yelling on the street below. I could hear it even over the music. Finally, 12:01 came. Nothing happened. A huge cheer went up on the dancefloor. Then the party went into overdrive. "Hypnotize," "Walking on the Sun" and "Backstreet's Back" were particularly popular that night. Oh, and of course "Groove is in the Heart" and "It Takes Two" made everyone move, too, even otherwise respectable-looking bourgeois with jobs: I always laughed when I saw white bankers singing along to rap songs. But by that point at the party, the alcohol was guaranteed to make everyone dance, no matter what was playing. Even so, as a DJ, I felt like I had accomplished something. Lots of drunk, happy people profusely thanked me for "all the great tunes" as the evening approached its end. It was always a nice perk to get compliments, even if the partygoers were fall-down drunk and virtually incoherent.

At about 3 AM, Joe showed up from his party. People had already started to leave. Beer and broken plastic cups littered the dancefloor, along with squashed finger foods and dirty napkins. Everyone was shouting, hugging, hooting, caressing and laughing. The mood was very good. Almost all the food was gone and the wine was running low. Joe went over to the hostess and whispered to her. She then came over to me and told me it was OK to start wrapping up.

Within 30 minutes, almost everyone had left and I stopped the music. The house lights came up. Joe started breaking down the lights and sound equipment. I chatted with the hostess for a while. She complimented me in the highest terms, even though she was utterly shitfaced. I still felt like I had done a good job; for my part, I did not touch a drink that evening. I had a few Sprites and some ice water. Finally, the hostess pulled out an enormous wad of $20 bills and handed it to me. I thanked her. She went away and I started helping Joe move all our stuff downstairs. Meanwhile, the hostess and her husband started brushing trash off the floor with two big push brooms.

It took us a good 30 minutes to haul all our stuff downstairs. We loaded it into the car and--once again--got it all to fit. After that, Joe and I shook hands and congratulated each other on a job well done. I handed him his $300 commission. Then he headed back uptown and he dropped me off at my dorm on 114th Street and Riverside. I wished Joe a happy new year and thanked him for being so generous to me. He said no problem and drove off into the predawn darkness.

I went upstairs to my room on the fourth floor. There was no way I could sleep after the night's toils. It was about quarter to five in the morning, January 1, 2000. I walked over to my single-size mattress. I took the enormous cash wad from my pocket and laid all the money out on the bedspread. I was in awe: $1500 in cash, all for me. I never thought I could ever make that much in one night. It was unbelievable. What a way to start the new year, the new decade, the new millennium. I felt like life could not get any better than this. I even felt that time had suddenly stopped, as if I could never get older, that this moment would last forever. After all, it was the year 2000! To that point in my life--indeed, in everyone's life--it had always been the 20th Century. I couldn't really fathom that life would go on as it always did. On that night, time froze as I sat there ogling my massive money pile. For a few hours, I felt utterly invincible. I felt that I controlled time and that I would never age.

I was hungry. I went out to get some food at Tom's Diner. It was extremely quiet. All the partying was over. A few stragglers appeared here and there, but that was it. I saw a few "2000" party eyeglasses in a trash can. It was still dark. As I headed down Broadway, a New York Times truck pulled up and a man tossed out the morning edition. I bought one. It had an unforgettably bold headline: 1/1/00. Underneath, in typeface almost as big, was a headline saying that Russia's President Yeltsin had resigned. A new man, Putin, was taking over.

Wow, I thought, everything was looking up! It was a fresh new morning in a fresh new millennium. I had $1500 in cash and there was a new Russian President. One era ended. Another was dawning. Time stood still and I was in control.

Then I went to Tom's and ordered a shake and fries. I stayed there for a while. I let myself get tired. Finally, I headed back to my dorm to go to sleep. It was dawning. Time for bed. It was a good night.

I still have never made that much money in one night as I did on January 1, 2000. I think that's why I remember it so vividly. It felt really good.

Too bad life got harder after that. But on that night, I didn't think anything could ever go wrong.

LEARNING SOCIAL REALITY THROUGH THE NEW YORK SUBWAY SYSTEM

A REFLECTION

I first moved to New York in 1996. Almost at once, I fell in love with the subway system. I loved the idea that you could get virtually anywhere in town from anywhere else in town. At first, I struggled to learn all the color-coded lines and their destinations. I did not dare to leave Manhattan. As an 18-year-old whipper snapper at Columbia University, I was told that going above 120th Street would get you killed. So would going to Brooklyn, The Bronx or Queens. Not coincidentally, Columbia seemed to insulate itself from the "natives" outside by demarcating its property with massive stone walls studded with guarded steel gates.

In hindsight, the racial implications inherent in this "advice" seem both shocking and absurd. Yet as a freshman in New York, I believed that the city was a "dangerous place." That contributed to its magical charm, at least for me. In 1996, Giuliani had only been in power for two years. New York still seemed thrillingly nasty compared to my sleepy suburban homestead in Connecticut. I gobbled it up. For me, riding the subway was like a second university education. I learned New York by riding the trains--and by watching the people on them.

It took me a while to escape the xenophobic prejudices we learned during Orientation Week at Columbia. But I remember one day before Christmas Break in December 1996 I decided to "risk my life" by riding the "N" train beyond Manhattan. I rode all the way to Coney Island.

It was a dark, forbidding winter night. I sat alone in the car, gazing wide-eyed at the passing stations. Very few people boarded or left the train. I kept thinking: "OK, I haven't been mugged yet; and I'm tough because I'm in Brooklyn now!" Then the train popped above ground. It was the first time I had ever been on a subway with elevated tracks. Many New York lines run above ground, but this was my "first time" on an El. At this point, I felt pretty cool. I just looked out over the Brooklyn night with Manhattan glittering in the distance. Yet at the same time, I felt as if danger could strike at any moment. That was what I loved about New York: I relished it because it was so smelly, so nasty, so abnormal, so dangerous, so unlike everything I had been raised in. But that's what made it beautiful.

I made it all the way to Coney Island without dying. No one even threatened to kill me. After I got there, I walked around the decaying train station near the shuttered amusement park. I felt like I had stepped back into the movie "Once Upon a Time in America." I suddenly remembered a scene from that movie in which the young gangsters locked a treasure in a strongbox on Coney Island. The storefronts looked like they hadn't been renovated since the 1920s. I went to a little fudge shop in the station and bought a big block of vanilla fudge for $1.00. "How cool is this?" I thought. The station smelled like urine mixed with disinfectant. After about 25 minutes, I got back on the train and headed back to Manhattan.

I survived Brooklyn. I was a New York veteran now, unlike all those cowards who stayed holed up in their Columbia dorm rooms.

Within 90 minutes, of course, I was holed up in my Columbia dorm room.

I recount this story because it was an early voyage in my lifelong love affair with New York and its subways. Over the years, I ventured out into the city more and more. I wanted to see all the places that tourists didn't see. I wanted to see the "most dangerous" parts of town, not the prettiest ones. I rode the trains for 8 hours at a time, stopping to take walks along the way. Eventually, I started bringing a camera on my trips. I snapped hundreds of shots. Thankfully, I still have them all. It's only been a decade since I took those pictures. Yet the New York in those pictures no longer exists. Things change fast around here, even without terrorist attacks.

I don't take pictures around town anymore. But I still know the subway system inside and out. I even know its history. The subway system has evolved over time, just like America's economic system. When the first subway opened in 1904, it was a private enterprise. The city had nothing to do with it. A private corporation called "Interborough Rapid Transit Co." (the "IRT") built all the lines and stations that now bear "numbers" rather than "letters." Back in those days, they referred to the train by the line it traveled. For example, it wasn't the "1 Train;" it was "The IRT Broadway/7th Avenue Local." It wasn't the "4 Train;" it was "The IRT Lexington Avenue Express/Jerome Avenue Line." Now, if I need to ride uptown on the West Side, I joke with my friends that I'm "taking the IRT." I like old stuff.

Hundreds of immigrants died building IRT tunnels and structures. The IRT opened during the golden age of capitalism; and the IRT got the job done. But true to capitalism's spirit, the IRT soon faced a private competitor: Brooklyn Mass Transit Co. (the "BMT"). The BMT built numerous lines throughout Brooklyn and Queens, siphoning off riders from the IRT. Price wars ensued.

With the Great Depression, however, the private companies could not continue operating without government aid. The city increasingly subsidized the IRT and BMT. In the mid-1930s, with New Deal funding, it even opened up its own subway system: The "Independent Subway" (the "IND"). Soon thereafter, the private subway companies folded. By the 1940s, the city took over from the private companies and began running their systems. In the case of New York City subways, capitalism did not work. The government took over, and--truth be told--it has done a very good job managing mass transit.

In a way, the fall of private subways in New York mirrors the New Deal that swept the country under FDR. Government got involved for the better. And it proved that government solutions sometimes work very well, despite all the whining from free market apologists. The sky did not fall when the city took over the subway system. Nor did it fall when government began regulating the securities markets.

Today, you can still learn a lot by riding around on the New York subway. You can see social reality at work, along with all the maddening inequality that comes with life in a big American city. New York--like America--is splintered along economic, ethnic and social lines. Blacks live in poor neighborhoods in the Outer Boroughs; affluent whites live in premiere Manhattan areas. Yet every neighborhood has a subway station. You can tell whether you're in a rich neighborhood by looking at the station and how many people get on the train. Stations with lots of paying riders get overhauls. They get new stairways, new elevators, new tiling, new lighting and new tracks. But poor stations with few paying riders rot away; they look like they are caught in a time warp. You know the neighborhood is bad when there are crumbling platform edges, decrepit columns, bad signs, dingy light fixtures and a bad PA system. This is classic American inequality. And it's all right there to see on the New York subway.

I also discovered that the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) publishes a "Ridership Table" detailing how many riders patronize each of the system's 468 stations. A quick glance at the figures confirms the inequality that simple observation reveals when traveling over the rails in New York. You can also see who lives where, and why some stations have many more paying riders than others. By studying these numbers, you can see demographic shifts at work. See http://www.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/ridership_sub_07.htm.

Consider the BMT Canarsie Line, AKA the "L Train." This train runs along 14th Street in Manhattan, then goes under the East River and into Brooklyn. Right across the river is a neighborhood called Williamsburg. The "L Train" conveniently stops right in the heart of the neighborhood at a station called "Bedford Avenue." Until the 1990s, Williamsburg was a largely Hispanic, working class district with a significant industrial base. As rents in Manhattan increased under Giuliani, however, many white Bohemians and young professionals fled across the river. They settled in Williamsburg. In the last 15 years, rents in Williamsburg have ballooned beyond all recognition. It is a "hip" and "trendy" place to be. Wine bars and vintage clothing shops have displaced textile factories. The MTA's ridership report confirms this demographic shift. In 2007, more than 5,600,000 people boarded trains at Bedford Avenue, far more than any other station along the "L Line" in Brooklyn.

Williamsburg's well-paid colonists can afford the fare. That explains why residents further along the "L Line" do not use stations nearly as much as those around Bedford Avenue. The "L Line" travels deep into Brooklyn and its allegedly "bad neighborhoods" like East New York and Brownsville. Leaving aside the question whether these neighborhoods are "bad," the MTA Ridership Report shows one thing: Not many people use the subway in these neighborhoods compared to the folks in Williamsburg. Consider the dilapidated "L Train" station at Bushwick Avenue-Aberdeen Street. Here, only 315,000 people boarded trains in 2007, even though it's only a short hop from Williamsburg.

Why the discrepancy? Simple: New York neighborhoods are segregated. Five and half million people could pay $2.00 a ride at Bedford Avenue in 2007, yet only 315,000 could do so at Bushwick Avenue. Two dollars might seem insigificant, but for people in Brownsville, it's a considerable expense. Other factors explain the discrepancy, too. Many people ride the subway to get to and from work every day. In Brownsville, unemployment is extremely high; there is no need for unemployed people to ride the train into the city. No one used the Bushwick Avenue station in 2007 because most people in the area are so poor that they could not afford the (then) $2.00 fare and because they had no jobs requiring subway transit. It is an economically depressed area. It is also largely African-American, and the crime rate is much higher than in more prosperous districts.

Just ride the New York subway and study ridership data to understand social realities in New York. Overall, New York is an extremely wealthy city. It generates phenomenal wealth. Rents in Manhattan are dizzyingly high. Yet just a few yards from luxury condos stand destitute housing projects teeming with unemployed, desperate people. You do not even have to go above ground to know that there are haves and have-nots in New York. Just ride a subway line and note the crumbling stations where no one seems to be waiting for a train. Then look at the ridership report and put the pieces together for yourself.

We hear that the gap between rich and poor is growing in this country. In New York, it has been obvious for a very long time. I saw it the moment I started riding trains around town. And it's only getting worse.

REUNITED WITH AN OLD FRIEND : FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

A REFLECTION

I was waiting for a friend in an office two days ago. Unlike most waiting rooms, this one actually had a bookcase with some good books, not just a table stacked with magazines about celebrity sightings. I looked over the titles. I saw familiar names: Kafka, Orwell, Dostoevsky, Bronte, Tolstoy, Woolf.

When I was younger, I loved literature. I dove into books, even did not fully understand them. I really thought literature would make me a better person; I thought it was good to read books. I even took pride in it. I went to school at Columbia in New York. They force you to read “classic literature” there. It’s called the “Core Curriculum.” Many of my classmates resented the compulsion to read so much. I actually enjoyed it; I disregarded the compulsion. I read for myself. I didn’t care what my teachers said; most of them were just graduate students anyway who had to teach the course to get their own degrees. I just conversed with the authors. I even read more over the summer because I liked the themes and ideas I encountered. I wanted to develop them in my head. I didn’t turn off my brain when the school year ended.

All these old impressions came back to me as I looked at that bookcase. A comforting feeling came over me, especially when I saw the name Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was my favorite author from my first year at Columbia. I dedicated the rest of my college days to reading just about everything he wrote. I read all his classic novels: Crime & Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Demons, The Idiot. I also read most of his short stories, like Notes from Underground, The Double and The Gambler. Taken together, these books profoundly influenced me. I even used Dostoevsky’s ideas to measure every other philosopher and writer I encountered. Not surprisingly, I liked philosophers and writers who echoed Dostoevsky, like Nietzsche, Kafka and Foucault. By contrast, I reviled philosophers and writers whose ideas stood in contrast to Dostoevsky, like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Dante and St. Augustine.

Dostoevsky was my heroic standard. But then I graduated from college and he faded from my mind. Forced to contend with commerce, I had no time to read Dostoevsky, or anyone else for that matter. My concerns simplified: Work, make money, go home, try to make more money next year. There was no need to think or to be creative. You just needed to put in time. I went to law school in an effort to boost my earning potential and finally get over the commercial hump. Of course, that didn’t happen; twentysomethings dream big but do not have life experience to know that nothing ever pans out as anticipated. True, I might know more now than I did when I was 22. I’m just knee-deep in debt for it.

During law school, I read more than I have ever read in my life. But I did not read any Dostoevsky. In fact, I read books that Dostoevsky would have detested. I read books and judicial opinions that posited “truth” and “objective standards,” two things Dostoevsky routinely criticized in his works. At the time, I did not reflect on the dissonance between the doctrines I was learning and the ideas I absorbed earlier in my life. Not until recently did I uncover that dissonance. It took heartbreak, suffering, reversal, humiliation, rediscovery and self-evaluation to recognize the foolishness in seeking “truth,” “objective standards” and “commercial success.” In short, it took life experience to bring my intellectual focus full circle. Law school doesn’t teach that. And in college, you are too young to amass it. Yet after law school, I contended with personal trauma after personal trauma. The ideas I absorbed in college started to make a lot more sense than they did before I had experience. By the same token, life experience made me deeply question the law and its orderly, well-polished claims to truth. Contrary to every statute, case and order, there really were no objective standards in life. Life was mysterious and unpredictable, not codified and discernable. No legal test could measure it or even judge it. Right and wrong were not juridical concepts; they were nebulous power judgments.

I slowly recognized that my “radical” college ideas were not so far-fetched. Satire became my stock in trade. Satire helped me reconcile my old learning with the absurdity I saw all around me. Satire helped me dethrone the law simply by referring to life. In short, satire helped me “get back to Dostoevsky.”

All these things swarmed my mind as I looked at that bookcase. I picked up a book: “Dostoevsky’s Short Works.” For the first time in almost ten years, I was opening a Dostoevsky book. I perused the contents: Notes from Underground and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. I had always wanted to read The Dream of a Ridiculous Man when I was in college. I never got around to it. I was 21 then. Now, at 31, here was my chance. I began reading. Within seconds, I was transported to another world, a familiar one.

I was ready to read Dostoevsky again. At first, I was somewhat embarrassed when I noticed how much he had influenced my own writing over the years. I recognized at once that I had unwittingly become a Dostoevsky imitator. His sentence structures and ruthlessly satirical attacks on “powerful people” obviously made a deep impression on me. His style won me over when I was young and I internalized it over many years. It has become so engrained that I can’t avoid sounding like Dostoevsky, at least in some ways. I can think of many things I have written in this blog that directly appropriate Dostoevsky’s style. For that reason, as I read The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, I eerily felt as if I was reading something I had written. After that passed, I simply felt content. I was just reading my mentor’s words. I felt as if I had been reunited with a dear friend. It was a wonderful feeling after such a long absence. On the other hand, it made me feel good to know that I had been carrying Dostoevsky’s banner on my blog all along, even if I hadn’t known it.

What is it exactly about Dostoevsky that influenced me so much? There are several key ways. For one, he is darkly satirical. He exaggerates details to mock “powerful people”—especially those with ranks and “high standing” in society. At the same time, he calls his heroes “ridiculous” when in fact they are quite noble. In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, for instance, Dostoevsky calls the protagonist “ridiculous,” “absurd,” “a madman,” "laughable" and “reclusive.” He is poor, lives in a one-room, partitioned apartment and has hundred-year-old furniture. Everyone laughs at him. But later on, we learn that this “ridiculous man” simply wants to treat others as he would like to be treated. For that, society calls him a blathering fool. That is dark satire—this is a man who has noble sentiments. He is not really ridiculous at all; he is only “ridiculous” in the judgment of a broken society. Society is ridiculous, not the good man it calls ridiculous. Dostoevsky knows irony. His sarcastic misanthropy definitely left a solid mark on me.

Second, Dostoevsky deeply understood that “truth” is an elusive—and judgmental—concept. He was one of the first authors to dig deeply into his characters’ conscious thought patterns. His narration, too, recurrently suggests that “things are not what they seem.” He stresses subjective impression and individual reaction to sense, not objective truth. He uses phrases such as “as if,” “even,” “somehow,” “in a way” and “some kind of” when describing people, events, feelings and recollections. This creates an overall impression that there is no “truth,” but rather only fleeting impressions in the minds of those who “were there” to sense something. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man abounds with these “uncertain recollections.” In fact, the reader consciously feels that everything is dark, muddled and indeterminate. When the protagonist recounts his dream, for instance, we have no idea what “actually happened.” In short, Dostoevsky understood that “truth” is in “the eye of the beholder.” Nietzsche picked up on this, too, when he argued that “there are no facts or truths, only interpretations.” In Dostoevsky’s works, every detail is an interpretation. Dostoevsky leaves it to the reader to put the pieces together—and that, too, is an “interpretation.”

Finally, Dostoevsky always tempered his sarcasm and satire with hope. This, too, influenced my writing. In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, for example, the protagonist—who once gave up on life because “nothing mattered to him anymore”—ultimately declares: “I will not and cannot believe that evil is the natural condition of people.” He goes on to say: “’Knowledge is higher than feelings…[t]he consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness’—that is what must be fought!” The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (Pevear/Volokhonsky trans., Bantam 2008) at pp. 338, 342. In short, Dostoevsky takes a stand against “juridical, rule-based” approaches to existence. “Feelings” are better than “knowledge,” and “happiness” is better than “the rules of happiness” because “feelings” and “happiness” intuitively flow from within the individual. By contrast, “knowledge” and “rules” must be “learned according to an extrinsic system.” They are “objective standards.” Yet the protagonist is “ridiculous” for making these discoveries. He is “ridiculous” for daring to oppose “the rules of happiness” and deciding simply to be happy. This is the ultimate satire: It is “ridiculous” to be happy and to savor individual intuitions.

These last ideas struck a familiar chord with me. They seem to mirror my entire opposition to juridical thinking and the objective standards that the law attempts to foist on human beings. How true that we live our lives attempting to mold our behavior to “the rules of happiness” rather than allowing ourselves to simply feel happiness in our own way. Rather than “feeling,” we seek always to “know” some extrinsic rule. In so doing, we forget our own emotions and subject ourselves to an “objective standard.” Someone else laid down the “rules of happiness;” we struggle to learn them. When we fail to reach them, we feel bad. In conforming to those rules, we steadily lose our capacity to form our own impressions about happiness. That is tragic.

Yet Dostoevsky’s message is not entirely pessimistic. After all, the “ridiculous man” does not mind being called “ridiculous.” He resolves to fight the “rules of happiness.” In essence, Dostoevsky holds out hope for those strong enough to fight against objective thinking. He offers support to all the “ridiculous people” who think and feel for themselves in a world that discourages individual approaches to happiness and meaning.

That is a beautiful message. After all, I am a “ridiculous man,” too. I actually consider it a compliment, not an insult. Ridiculous people survive though the ages, not those who merely follow the “rules of happiness.” In fact, ridiculous people might even find their own happiness somewhere along life’s way. The important thing is not to mind being labeled ridiculous. Ridiculous people are special, even if they are not “successful.” Dostoevsky knew that, and that’s one big reason he influenced me so much.