Drugs Are Kewl

I've been awake since around 9:00 am Sunday morning. And I just got over the hump---(started and) finished reading Crime and Punishment and wrote a 15 page essay on same over the last 30 hours or so.

What's my secret? Psychotropic drugs. Specifically, aderol, the prescription ADD drug that packs all (okay, most of) the fun of cocaine into a smoother, longer high and doesn't run the risk of tertiary involvement in a Latin American crime syndicate. [John Ashcroft is going to win the war on terror by cutting off the supply route that runs from the coke-stuffed condom up the asshole of a Colombian mule to the right, and sometimes left nostril of a rich white teenager in Greenwich, CT. Or if that proves difficult, he can always arrest some homeless crackheads in the south Bronx (intent to distribute, y'know)--ed.]

So how'd the paper go, you ask? Amazing, natch. But I'm beginning to reach the conclusion that it's impossible for me to interpret literature except through the prism of my training in philosophy. A lot of that, undoubtedly, is do to the influence of one or two individual professors. (And how many academics ever succeed in moving entirely away from the positions of their undergraduate mentors?) I feel decidedly odd in literature classes these days. I'm accustomed to---and try to bring to section---a kind of systematic rigor that is always just a bit out of place among literature TAs. These are the folks, after all, who would respond to bedrock principles of linguistic practice among almost all my colleagues in philosophy---e.g., that the affirmation of any proposition p necessarily entails the denial of ~p---by accusing us of asserting a false binary (and probably oppressing the oppressed somewhere as well).

In this case, I read Crime and Punishment as, at root, a novelistic examination of meta-ethics in the context of indubitable but as-yet unexplained traditional Orthodox theological metaphysics. In other words, we just take it for granted that God and the good are inextricable. Why? And how can we justify justification? In a way, the murder and the detective story are only incidental. What's really interesting is the meta-ethical inquiry going on in the subterranean allegorical strata that the primary narrative of Raskolnikov and Sonya is built on.

I should also acknowledge the possibility that I might be blinded by a very selective sample. Namely, I almost never read anything for pleasure that one would not reasonably expect a philosopher to have a philosophical interest in. That means, as far as literature goes, that Dostoevsky and T.S. Eliot are in, Jane Austen and (sadly, but probably) George Eliot are out. I just can't take a few hundred pages of English domestic relations if no one is having an existential crisis or pondering suicide even though his life is perfectly happy or standing on trial for a crime of which he is innocent but is certain to be found guilty, or...whatever else a poisoned (and hence, interesting) imagination could devise.