2.3 Peasant Women who Have Faith
Truly I hadn't noticed before how much of a microcosm of the entire book this chapter is until I started writing this. Pain and hunger weaken the body, the wails of the klikushi pierce ears, the faces of the dead stay in the back of the eye: pain is a very present question, a far cry from a philosophical hypothetical or idle thoughts. The immanence (meaning, present and within the world) of the pain carried by the peasant women seeking healing and the immanence of the experience of God in the earth are the bare bones of recurring dilemmas that will keep coming up in the future.
Out of the different exchanges that Zosima has with the peasant women, two stand out to me: the grieving mother and the young widow who is implied to have poisoned her abusive old husband and feels sick with guilt. Both emotions are throughly explored; grief, guilt, and the despair that often accompanies them. Grief and guilt have unique ways of alienating us.
Every passing of a loved one takes away a piece of ourselves, the past becomes a tomb, and in cases such as the death of a child, the future no longer exists— it is then when we realize we truly don't have futures. How cruel it is that an emotion every human will experience in their lives feels so profoundly lonely? The grieving mother feels despair, she doesn't want to be herself, she rejects a world without her little Alexey in it. The promise of Heaven alone, that is, transcendence, is not enough (more on that later). She has no use of it when her heart has been ripped out of her own world. On the other hand, the widow suffers from guilt, a pain that alienates in a similar manner. Alone with the weight of what she's done, the widow is alone with her emotion and afraid to die and of what has become of herself —if only it hadn't come to that, if only it had been different from the beginning. Guilt is self- conscious, yet it tends to drive you away from the present reality.
With compassion, Zosima offers love in the world itself as an antidote, to heal alongside others to return to themselves as human beings of the world who are responsible towards others; the mother is told to start by grieving alongside her husband and to never abandon him, and the widow's guilt must transform into responsibility. It circles back: the threat of despair has taken them away from the world and up to the monastery, and only afterwards they can return and heal. The last of the peasant women ends the chapter in a positive note, bringing joy and going back home with more. What do we mean when we talk of behaving like a human being, and is there something as being so human it becomes self- negating?
--------
Links:
@keepingupwiththekaramazovs