“All the Strange and Peculiar Circumstances of the Crime Were Taken into Consideration”

Also: Against “selected poems,” at the Atelier Devauchelle in Paris, revisiting Thomas Merton’s affair, in praise of Terence Rattigan, and more.

A sketch of Crime and Punishment by Mikhail Shemiakin. Source: Petro Jacyk Exhibit Collection, University of Toronto.

What happened to personality, good and evil, human agency? Freya India writes about how “mechanistic” explanations of the human person are absurdly reductive:

Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are. Nobody has a personality anymore.

In a therapeutic culture, every personality trait becomes a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling too strong—has to be labelled and explained. And this inevitably expands over time, encompassing more and more of us, until nobody is normal. Some say young people are making their disorders their whole personality. No; it’s worse than that. Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.

This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.

More:

Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD. You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does, but autism. You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events. Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorised. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalised.

This has been going on for some time. You remember, perhaps, the epilogue to Crime and Punishment? Raskolnikov admits “firmly” and “clearly” that he murdered Alyona and Lizaveta. He did so, he says, because of “his miserable position, his poverty and helplessness . . . his shallow and cowardly nature, exasperated moreover by privation and failure. To the question what led him to confess, he answered that it was his heartfelt repentance.”

The psychologists in court find this “heartfelt repentance” rather unrefined, “almost coarse.” Rather than thinking of his actions in terms of good and evil, they prefer to think of them in terms of psychological and biological causes:

[S]ome of the lawyers more versed in psychology admitted that it was possible he had really not looked into the purse, and so didn’t know what was in it when he hid it under the stone. But they immediately drew the deduction that the crime could only have been committed through temporary mental derangement, through homicidal mania, without object or the pursuit of gain. This fell in with the most recent fashionable theory of temporary insanity, so often applied in our days in criminal cases. Moreover, Raskolnikov’s hypochondriacal condition was proved by many witnesses, by Dr. Zossimov, his former fellow students, his landlady and her servant. All this pointed strongly to the conclusion that Raskolnikov was not quite like an ordinary murderer and robber, but that there was another element in the case.

Crime and Punishment ends somewhat ambiguously, but I think Dostoevsky is critiquing the court’s decision to blame Raskolnikov’s “abnormal mental condition” for the murder of Alyona and Lizaveta. There is something strangely dehumanizing about this otherwise humane sentence.

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In other news, Steve Knepper writes against editions of “selected poems”:

A volume of “Selected Poems” has its uses. It can be a good introduction to a poet’s work and, if organized chronologically, to how that work has changed over time. Even an important poet’s collections can go out of print, so a “Selected” ensures that some earlier work remains readily available. A “Selected” also gives insight into the poet’s own sense of her achievement, of the work that she sees as best or at least most interesting, of what she hopes will stand the test of time.

I readily concede all of this, but I still remain ambivalent about “Selected Poems” volumes for two reasons. For one, individual collections of any selected-worthy poet tend to have a certain coherence. The whole offers something irreducible to the parts. That coherence may be a composite narrative or an overt shared theme or setting, but it may also be formal or linguistic. It may be more loosely or subtly thematic. It may be a certain palette of tones. It may be certain presiding poetic influences. Individual poems can stand on their own. But something is gained by reading them in a thoughtful collection, even if other poems in that collection are decidedly weaker. And “Selected” volumes, made up of poems harvested over a longer time period, rarely offer that same “something.”

This brings me to the second reason why I am lukewarm about volumes of “Selected Poems.” I often disagree about what counts as a poet’s best work. When I know a poet’s collections, I am often surprised about what has made it between the covers of the “Selected.” For sure, some of this is subjective—what I prefer will not be the same as what you prefer. I grew up on a small dairy farm in Pennsylvania, so I am often drawn to poems about rural life and nature. Because of such differences in taste, you may find individual collections, or poems within collections, more to your liking than a poet’s “Selected.”

Matthew Milliner writes about Thomas Merton’s affair in Comment: “In 1966, a Trappist monk from Kentucky’s Abbey of Gethsemani had an affair with a nursing student. Her name was Margie, and you already know his. Thomas Merton never intended for this to always remain a secret. The details of the affair (which is what Merton repeatedly called it), and the poems that accompanied it (not his best work), were all planned for publication twenty-five years after his death. Merton burned all the letters from Margie, who—truer to the Trappist tradition of silence than Merton himself—never uttered a word about their relationship.”