DDDP: Page 412
I have fifty some pages left in part two. When I started the book, I set for myself a similar goal to the one I had with Gravity’s Rainbow— about thirty pages a day, or in the case of Demons rounded up to a chapter—but as I fell more and more behind and found more excuses to leave the book unopened for days at a time, I stopped really caring about goals. I’ll finish the book, but I don’t care when. I learned a new word today, “shigalyovism,” which I’ll have to remember if I ever find myself talking about solutions to social problems.
This book seems most interesting when people stop talking and start doing things, but that doesn’t happen very often, and the things they do either don’t amount to anything, like the duel, or don’t seem to have any meaning at all, like the visit to Semyon Yakovlevich. Sure, I guess each has each has meaning—the duel established some character, and the visit to the holy fool introduced the idea of inspired religious madness than be seen and contrasted in other characters—but as events they were meaningless. The plot itself is spread thinly across an expanse of endless paper blackened with empty words. I think I have a new metaphor for how Vegemite is supposed to be spread.
People have finally started talking about the murder, mostly in terms of the use of a murder with purely political motives. An angry mob is starting to form, though it’s not yet clear where their anger is going to be directed. I suppose I could just read the foreword to gain that bit of perspective, but I don’t care that much. The malice resonating within the group of conspirators seems to be pointing to that small handful of characters I sort of like, the sons of the annoying couple from the beginning and Shatov, the serf turned pamphleteer. I like those characters above any of the others since they seem the only ones able to look at this ridiculous mess with apathy.