A Note on the Sources

A few months ago, one of our readers noted that Rural Way's reading list is "nuttily eclectic."  While we don't disagree, one of the advantages to this method of reading is the opportunity to discover unexpected connections.  Doesn't it give you a jolt to discover the same idea in two different works written sometimes thousands of years apart and in completely different contexts?  Does anyone doubt, for example, that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the same story as the one found in The Gospel of Matthew (or Mark, or Luke)?  Or that Thomas Merton's No Man is an Island covers some of the same ground as Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled (no pun intended)?

Even better is the triple play, where you discover a connection between three authors.  I had one of those earlier this year when I was reading Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park.  Smith makes, in the middle of his thriller, a connection between Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Camus's The Stranger.  Bingo.  Haven't you read those two back to back and wondered if Camus was responding to Dostoyevsky, or perhaps updating him?  Here is how Smith's Gorky Park character has it:

"But you can't do Camus's The Stranger for a soviet audience.  A man takes the life of a total stranger for no reason but ennui?  Its purely Western excess.  Middle class comfort leads inevitably to ennui and unmotivated murder.  The police are used to it, but here in a progressive socialist society no one is tainted by ennui.

What about Crime and Punishment?  What about Raskolnikov?

My very point.  For all his existentialist rambling, even Raskolnikov just wanted to get his hands on a few rubles.  You'd be as likely to find an unmotivated act here as you would be to find a tropical bird outside your window.  There would be mass confusion.  Camus's murderer would never be caught here."

See what I mean?  If you've got the tortured face of Raskolnikov stuck in your mind when you're reading Camus, you start to feel like there might be a connection.  And, then you read an American best seller and find that you're not the only one who thinks so.