Puddles That Were

Rainy day, staring down into the pool on the ground.  Drops radiate outward one after another.  Puddles will remind you of puddles from when you were young.  Glenwood Road puddles that have formed suddenly in the gutter.  You’ll certainly play in them.  Puddles that could ruin your day, soaking socks and leaving them wet till you came back home.  Puddles that were springtime when you’d only had six or seven, springtime’s to consider.  You couldn’t explain much about puddles so you stared and splashed and assumed.  And now I just walk around them with a glance.

To my left a paper shredder is mulching some documents.  One imagines the paper frightened at first and then reborn.  That last word was probably lodged on account of the reading my older one and I did on the ride down this morning.  Finally, we reached the shattering moment when Roskolnikov walks up to the third floor to Ilya Petrovich’ desk for the second time, an about face after learning of Svidrigailov’s suicide, and after confronting Sonya, speechless on the first floor.

We’d started, on an earlier passage that lead him to the police.  As I read it I drew my daughter’s attention to just how remarkable it was:

“He had suddenly recalled Sonya’s words:  ‘Go up to the crossroads, bow to the people, kiss the earth, because you have sinned against it too, and tell the whole world out loud: “I’m a murderer!”’  In remembering them he began to tremble all over. And such a crushing weight did he now carry from the hopeless despair and anxiety of all this recent time and especially this last few hours that he fairly leapt at the chance of this pure, new complete sensation.  It suddenly hit him like an epileptic seizure: a single spark began to grow within his soul and suddenly it engulfed everything like fire.

I usually think of Christianity is historical terms, and what it meant for this or that period of time.  The architecture that holds up the miraculous has long seemed too tortuous and implausible to offer me much of anything that isn’t academic.  And then, in the hands of someone masterful like Dostoyevsky I am reacquainted with the human need to confess and just why the faith proves so enduring.  This lever touches something central in our spinal column: a yearning be reborn.