À la moitié du chemin de la vraie vie, nous étions environnés d’une sombre mélancolie, qu’ont exprimée tant de mots railleurs et tristes, dans le café de la jeunesse perdue.

Guy Debord

The air was cold and the stone sombre as my eyes thirstily stripped the city naked in the fresh autumnal wind. It swayed the branches above my head in soft whisper and brought with it the damp scent of October. Infused with proverbial melancholy, autumn becomes Paris like a finely tailored muslin chemise to Madame Récamier smiling shyly from François Gérard’s tender portrait.

Drunk on the atmosphere of the Capital of the World and the generous smiles of dashing French gentlemen, the archetypes of elegance à la française, I wandered through the streets like a sleepwalker in that October 2016, from Frédéric Chopin’s grave at Cimetière Père Lachaise to Île de la Cité, Place de Dauphine and the statue of King Henry IV., passing endearing little cafés whose lights winked mischievously at me with their warm glow, promising an atmosphere of incredible intimacy as the day became subdued by the outstretched arms of shadows. I wondered what strange fluidum it is that runs through the throbbing vessels of the city’s flesh, emanating such strong magnetism that chance encounters become lovers writing history and simple ideas immortal works of art.

Paris is a city to get lost in, undoubtedly. Like an old antiquarian bookshop, it is an elaborate edifice of untold stories, names, names and names imprinted in the stucco of the buildings, the cracks in the pavement, the cobbles in the streets. There is always a ghost running at your heels that evaporates in the evening mist behind the next corner, and chasing them feels exhilarating.

Pour moi, l’automne n’a jamais été une saison triste. Les feuilles mortes et les jours de plus en plus courts ne m’ont jamais évoqué la fin de quelque chose mais plutôt une attente d’avenir.

Patrick Modiano – Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue

Tasting the autumnal Paris through the refracted glass of Modiano’s multiple narrators, the reader slowly retraces the gently vibrating strings of a youth enveloped in haunting sadness, like a quivering harp carrying a deeply sorrowful melody. A student without a name, a detective, an abandoned husband, a lover. All of them slowly spin a delicate thread, build a picture of a woman whose face and voice blend with the city’s veins, a woman whose only legacy is a history of her presence at Café du Condé, the centre stage of evening encounters shrouded in half-truths, nicknames and mystery. Who is Louki, this woman who runs with the shadows of Paris, changes logements as though she were hunted and sits in the distant corner of the café, habitually coming in through the narrower and darker of the two entrances? And why is her voice so so piercing, almost like a plea for rescue from the shattered ruins of her past?

In the little novel, past becomes a narrator of its own, retelling a story of loss and visceral loneliness pervading the very core of the heroine, loneliness that sets her mercilessly apart from her surroundings, stemming from wounds she found hard to face, or perhaps even name. They became phantoms relentlessly pursuing her in her exhaustive need to flee – flee everything and everyone, but mostly flee herself in a misguided attempt at liberation from the chains that were binding her.

Plus tard, j’ai ressenti la même ivresse chaque fois que je coupais les ponts avec quelqu’un. Je n’étais vraiment moi-même qu’à l’instant que je m’enfuyais. Mes seuls bons souvenirs sont des souvenirs de fuite ou de fugue.

Patrick Modiano – Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue

As she too becomes a phantom to pursue those who once loved her, Modiano’s poignant prose takes the reader on a sombre tour through Paris’s night streets, abandoned cafés, memories slumbering in the dim lights of the street lamps, each one a shadow curled up in the hearts of those who loved and lost.

Encore aujourd’hui, il m’arrive d’entendre, le soir, une voix qui m’appelle par mon prénom, dans la rue. Une voix rauque. Elle traîne un peu sur les syllabes et je la reconnais tout de suit : la voix de Louki. Je me retourne, mais il n’y a personne. Pas seulement le soir, mais au creux de ces après-midi d’été où vous ne savez plus très bien en quelle année vous êtes. Tout va recommencer comme avant. Les mêmes jours, les mêmes nuits, les mêmes lieux, les mêmes rencontres. L’Éternel retour.

À partir de cet instant-là, il y a eu une absence dans ma vie, un blanc, qui ne me causait pas simplement une sensation de vide, mais que je ne pouvais pas soutenir du regard. Tout ce blanc m’éblouissait d’une lumière vive, irradiante. Et cela sera comme ça, jusqu’à la fin.

Patrick Modiano – Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue

People pass through the landscape of our hearts, always leaving a trace, a shadow upon their departure – a shadow whose contours are accentuated in due proportion by the intensity of our love’s light. And we are left wondering, waiting for the l’éternel retour that never comes, staggering through the abandoned streets of a city submerged in night, chasing ghosts that always evaporate behind the corner of the next street.

What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight. Woven together, inextricably commingled, bound in pain and strewn in sorrow—crash!

Virginia Woolf – The String Quartet

Like a flow of tender ripples, the words come rushing forward with a sparkling foam on their crests, seeping through the paper in merry chant of playful, Mozartean lightness as Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness unfolds in a crowded room filled with expectation-charged silence where four figures in fancy suits simultaneously lift the bows in elegant, sweeping arch, ready to touch the tense strings impatiently bursting with the wealth of unheard melodies.

The narrator’s thoughts pace back and forth between scattered exchanges whispered in the mild shadows of the dimly-lighted concert room and a wild torrent of vivid imagery, a flame ignited by the essential spark of music. Woolf’s narrative is music itself, her voice is a bow held in the deft fingers of a virtuoso violinist whose crystalline tone is brimming with passion, subtle twists leading into unexpected, soaring altered chords in what seems to be a perfectly non-defined, structure-defying symphonic poem.

A miniature of fleeting perceptions and ephemeral feelings, though little revealing about music itself, The String Quartet is thought to be one of Virginia Woolf’s most acclaimed short stories. Just follow the path of music, the path of her words, grasping the silky threads of little nuances here and there, arriving to places never known before. Rushing from one scale into another in a stream of consciousness, the breath of her melody leaves you bedazzled and stupefied, like two musicians recovering from the heat of improvisation, looking at each other in profound amazement when the last pearly notes of their instruments dissolve in gentle diminuendo and blend into the welcoming embrace of silence, not realizing how they got from one key to another.

The boat sinks. Rising, the figures ascend, but now leaf thin, tapering to a dusky wraith, which, fiery tipped, draws its twofold passion from my heart. For me it sings, unseals my sorrow, thaws compassion, floods with love the sunless world, nor, ceasing, abates its tenderness but deftly, subtly, weaves in and out until in this pattern, this consummation, the cleft ones unify; soar, sob, sink to rest, sorrow and joy.

Virginia Woolf – The String Quartet

V. Honour thy father and mother

VI. Thou shalt do no murder

Exodus 20, 7 – 8

Sergei Rachmaninoff – Piano concerto no. 2, mov. 1 – Moderato

When entrapped in the sinister province of human mind, Dostoyevsky’s sovereign work field, multiple questions are bound to arise during and after the process of probing this dark abyss full of dangerous passions suppressed and unleashed, agonies of spiritual and physical suffering, shadows of madness looming large over sparse neurons of sanity. With bated breath one stands aside and watches as one is helplessly pulled into this terrifying roller-coaster ride only to finish spitted out exhausted in feeling and rational thinking onto the shores of empty confusion. The Karamazov Brothers is a philosophical walk through fire, a test of courage and personal convictions, a meeting with all the forces of Heaven and Hell clashing together in stormy encounter, the furious rattling of the steely kisses of enemy swords ringing in one’s head as the mad swirl of drums preceding a criminal’s execution.

One human. Thousand faces. Thousands of passions. Thousands of conflicts.

Family, honour, passion, piety, religion, atheism, politics, justice, crime, guilt, violence, suffering, mysticism. The bricks that make this philosophical monument a lasting prophesy of a genius mind, standing strictly opposed to each other, yet firmly entwined in what seems to be a kaleidoscope of a dark complexity. Moral, social, political, psychological and spiritual crises are blended in various shades of grey in between the sharp contrast of black and white, good versus evil.

Standing as the final accomplishment among the masterworks of the great Russian triumvirate, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, The Karamazov Brothers presents an extremely fertile field for exploring human nature, and consequently also the world as a reflection of the innermost, intimate working of human mind. For what else is world, if not a reflection of who we are?

Body, mind and spirit – three brothers divided by elements of fundamental difference, brought together by bloodshed, united by a sense of guilt. Dimitri, the representation of passionate sensualism, Ivan, the embodiment of ever-sceptic intellectualism, and Alyosha, the innocence of firm spiritual devotion. And lastly Smerdyakov, the offspring of malice, cunning and contempt.

Rather than elaborating on the nature of each of the leading figures in this dramatic epopee, I cannot but declare how in awe I was of the dexterity with which Dostoyevsky works with these pulsating fibres of human intricacy, interweaving and pulling them apart on the precipices of their irreconcilable differences. Intriguing and complicated set of minds is presented to the reader as the brothers’ natural impulses come to inevitable conflict, starting with Dimitri’s irrepressible urge to kill because of jealousy fuelled by a passionate love for a woman, continuing with Ivan’s staunch undermining of God and religion by presenting a profound discourse on injustice and suffering, finished by Alyosha’s pious and peaceful, gentle love for God and humanity.

One could easily take the three brothers as a united model of the inner construction of human nature in general. In each human being, there are the germs of the Karamazov attributes scattered in different proportions, their prevalence depending on the inclination, maturity and life experience of the individual.

Moving from character traits and inner impulses to a higher dimension, the eternal struggle of faith with reason unfolds on the backdrop of a highly dysfunctional family, for me by far the most complex and intriguing of the palette of struggles presented by Dostoyevsky, culminating in Ivan’s descent into madness. The Grand Inquisitor, standing in grim contrast to Father Zosima’s exhortations, was a reflection of the fundamental questions every spiritually-minded person will pose to themselves over again during their lives – if there is God, and God is eternal love, why is there suffering on earth? Is free will truly a gift, or a curse to the human race? Is it not better for us helpless mortals to be led and shown the right way, instead of being generously given the opportunity to inflict deep wounds on each other? Shall one take as a sin solely the transformation of thoughts into actions, or the thought itself already? Is there an eternal life, a reality beyond the grasp of our mind with which we are tightly bound by the inherent, ceaseless longing for something transcendental?

On earth we are as it were astray. Much on the earth is hidden from us, but to make up for that we have been given a mysterious hidden longing for our living bond with the other world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why the philosophers say that we cannot apprehend the reality of things on earth.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky – The Karamazov Brothers

Part of the answer to Dostoyevsky’s crucial questions of spiritual doubting can be found in Ivan’s precarious conviction that everything is lawful, which ultimately leads to a turning point in the story, causing a stormy downward spiral to hell. Everything is lawful – a clue to the author’s prophesy about a world without faith, God and morality which stands merely on the tottering pillars of atheism, socialism and materialism.

What made an everlasting impression on my mind from this impassioned philosophical monument was the scene of the Devil visiting Ivan in his nightmare. From all chapters, this one I found the cornerstone, the key to Dostoyevsky’s philosophy.

Le diable n’existe point.

The mirroring sentence to everything is lawful is a clue to the tragedy of the essential crime of The Karamazov Brothers, just as it is, in my mind, a clue to the tragedy of the evil committed in the world in such wild abundance. If one does not believe in evil itself, what can condemn crime and criminality as amoral? If one does not believe in moral laws, what else is there to prevent one from causing harm, pain and injustice?

The Karamazov Brothers is a metaphysical argument embedded in a world of ruthless sensuality that poses questions vital to the survival of human morality by shedding different light on progressing secularity that is increasingly set on eclipsing the existence of a higher, spiritual dimension of human race; questions valid for this age because of the polemics of human mind they encompass, creating an ever-repeating struggle of the variability of our essence.