I Now Get it

Napoleon was a terror, a force, a tyrant, a liberator, a revolutionary, a scoundrel, a murderer, a reformer, an emperor.  While reading Napoleon by Christopher Harold, I noticed that Napoleon was a man who carved for himself. He was a man who while forging an empire, used brutal tactics that forever changed the world and with such carving, hollowed out himself. Did he change the world? Yes, but is it better for him having lived? We may never know. He, like so many rulers who came before, justified his actions of savagery to reform the world in his own image, only to have his victories snatched away, his records in battle decimated, his policy ossified, and leave his people rebellious. 

I now understand Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov's desire to be a Napoleon. What he actually desires is the ability to do whatever he believes is best for him in whatever state he finds himself. They desire greatness in the most Machiavellian way possible. Greatness cannot stand pristine in the eyes of history, in the eyes of human consciousness, and in the eyes of God when it stands on a pile of corpses and besmeared in gluttonous blood.  

This hedonistic, power hungry, moralizing does not work out well for Raskolnikov or for Napoleon in the long run. Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky's narrative of a man possessed by an idea such as "I can do any evil insofar as the end result is good" captures the natural state of mankind so well. When has any selfish desire come into the mind of man without the equal justification for that idea also showing up as an itinerant and mostly degenerate guest? The I-can-have-this-if-I-only-do-that-one-evil-act argument always leads to more suffering in the world. 

Does the evil ever justify the good? History may say yes, but we are only here because of the ongoing balance between those who perpetrate great upheaval and those who seek to set righteousness up. Our literature says otherwise. Those characters, fictional or historical, who do these great and terrible acts are usually brought down, their creations decimated, and their reputations destroyed. 

I think that the argument is best summed up in the scene in Ollivander's Wand Shop in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. This scene shows two possible narrative outcomes, Selflessness and Love versus Selfishness and Hate, each represented by matching wand cores and those who wield them. Harry and Voldemort. One a type of Christ, the other a type of Death. Both are great. Only one seems to be a good long-term strategy to greatness as both Harry and Raskolnikov discover. 

James J. and Childhood Memory

While reading James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I was impressed by Joyce's ability to capture memory. Reading the book is like experiencing someone's recollection of events instead of the straightforward retelling of them in chronological order.
What can really be said about the truth of childhood memory? I was transported back to some no-when where I slept on the shag brown carpet with berber patterns that smelled of dust and wind-blown dirt for tilled pot-diluvian fields in my grandparent's farmhouse basement. It was dark and winter-cold, the disheveled and tinsel-laden Christmas tree aglow in soft light by the stairwell of the suspended stairs that dropped sand in our eyes when someone treads upon them. The soft glow of Christmas hope, the cold dark of winter death in the corners, the smell of dust and dirt in our nostrils.
What were we doing there is a fact beyond my memory. I'm not even sure whether it was December or even winter, but the imagery of the memory is there, meshed and blended with the panorama of that time. Making what I remember and what I imagined justly true in my mind's eye.
The blend of fact and fantasy, memory and imagination is the experience of all people. This blending and immersive experience is what makes Joyce so fun to read. We make an excursion into the fluidity of our own memory and being that causes us to consider that who we are and who we think we are, are closer and more interrelated then we think.