Dostoyevsky and Me -- Life has a pattern to it!

The amazing thing about life and its inevitable pattern.

Schopenhauer points out that when we reach an advanced age and look back over our lifetime, we can see a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed the plot?

Schopenhauer suggests that just as an aspect of ourselves, which our consciousness is unaware composes our dreams, so, too, our whole life is composed by the will within us.

I was reminded of this once again as I discovered a paper I had written as a sophomore in college many years ago, so long ago that many of you were not yet born. It was a core course, or required course of all students at the University of Iowa, and was called "modern literature."

It is where I first met Dostoyevsky, a writer whose works I have read and reread many times, as well as several biographies of his unusual life. Not wanting to lose this only paper of the many I wrote during that period, I put it in my documents, and now share it with you.

For those of you who have read me over the years, I sense that you will see the nascent influence, admittedly in a very sophomoric way as presented here, but a telling one as well.

Once smitten with that course in literature, I never quite got Dostoyevsky or it out of my system, and now, as my energies and lights are in the afternoon of my life, I realize my professor knew me far better than I knew myself. But alas, like Schopenhauer has said, it all fits a pattern.

Be always well and enjoy my initial encounter of this great Russian writer.