This post continues talking about my summer holiday from August to September. I will talk about movies I watched and books I read.
The Brothers Karamazov
Reading Dostoevsky has always been one of my dreams since 2013, when one of my friends expressed her deep reverence to this great writer, the poineer of modern psychology, and a great influencer of great philosophies like Nietzsche. However, Dostoevsky’s novels have a reputation for being hard to read, and I indeed got completely lost when reading his Crime and Punishment in 2014. As a result, I have been a little frightened and never dared to try reading him again for almost 10 years.
However, I just kept seeing his name in different places and many people from different backgrounds speak highly of Dostoevsky:
- Two years ago, when I was studying Peterson’s psychology course, there was a whole lecture dedicated to Dostoevsky when talking about existentialism and Peterson always refers him as a genius.
- Then, in last year, when watching Lex Fridman’s podcast where he interviewed Peterson, they thought Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is the greatest novel ever written.
- Still last year, around August, when talking with a mathematician friend, Zhiyuan Ding, about the Bible, he urged me to read The Brothers Karamazov because one of the characters will answer many of my questions I asked him.
- Finally, around August this year, when I was watching Prof. Polyakov explaining airfoil lifting force, he casually quoted a line in The Brothers Karamazov, “If there is no God, everything is permitted” (see the picture of the movie above).
It seemed inevitable for me to read this novel at the point and I did it during my holiday. Quite unexpectedly, I finished reading it quite smoothly and the feeling was like watching the Game of Thorne: I just couldn’t stop reading once started! The plot is well-organized and the dialogue between the characters is super deep and interesting. It is almost a crime for me to try summarizing it here. Just go and read it if you are puzzled by the complexity of human nature and the unexplainable irrational behavior of our fellow human beings and ourselves. It is a masterpiece!
How amazing is this book? Let me put it in this way. After reading this book, I want to read all books by Dostoevsky. After reading this book, I printed a portrait of Dostoevsky as a poster on my wall and could resist bowing down to him. After returning Japan, in October, I finished his Notes from Underground; now, I’m reading The Idiot. I just cannot stop!!
Oppenheimer (film by Christopher Nolan)
This movie was released in this summer but is delayed to 2024 in Japan. Luckily, it was realized in China in the end of August, when I happened to be at my hometown. I have been looking forward to this movie since it was announced more than a year ago. After all, it is a movie about a charming physicist. General audience can know one more physicist other than Einstein.
Compared with Einstein, Oppenheimer had a much more complicated character. He was deeply interested in literature, art, music and Hinduism. Nolan showed this in the movie when Oppie leaved Cambridge for Göttingen (see the pictures above). I’m deeply attracted to such a colorful and kaleidoscope-like life.
Nolan has done a great job portraying how a physicist works. I have always had a personal experience when I can see physical process being reconstructed vividly using mathematic expression. It is a joyful experience, but very, very hard to convey to another who has never had such an experience. Nolan used a conversation between Bohr and Oppenheimer to show what a physicist see when he sees mathematics on the paper (see the screenshots of the movie below). This is a great metaphor! When we see math on the paper, the best case is that we can see it dance, just like Beethoven can hear the music in his head when seeing the score even after he was completely deaf.
I believe Oppenheimer was deeply influenced by Hinduism philosophy, which affected his political view and life attitude. When asking about the atomic bomb later in his life, he famously quoted a line in Bhagavad Gita:
I knew nothing about this before. However, I vaguely remembered a MIT professor named after Krishna when I attended a summer school in Sweden in June. Hindu influence on China has been largely due to Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha, but we know little about what happens before his time. When talking with one of the members in my research group, Katsuya, about this movie and Oppie’s quote, he strongly recommended Bhagavad Gita to me. This is the start of my exploration of the ancient Hindu culture and philosophy.
Mahabharata
As it turns out, Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue happened in a long epic of ancient India called Mahabharata, which literally means “the great India” (“maha” means great and “bhrata” is another name for India; here is an interesting explanation about this unfamiliar name). I finished reading Bhagavad Gita right before my summer holiday (written in Chinese) and fell in love with this great book immediately. Naturally, I sought the whole story into which it is embedded. The epic Mahabharata is clearly too long for me to read as a first pass, let alone it is written in a poetic form. Luckily, Indian people love this epic, so they made TV dramas based on this epic frequently. I found a quite recent one around 2013 and watched them in a slow pace during my summer holiday. It blows my mind!! Its plot is way more intricate and interesting than the Game of Thorne! The discussion of the philosophy and deep topic of life is integrated well into this intriguing story line, just like Dostoevsky’s novels. I’m completely into the whole Hindu cultural and epics now. The whole epic is trying to tell us something very deep and fundamental about the nature of human beings
The story is full of tension. Nobody has his any plan go smoothly. Always, I mean, always, something quite accidental happens and interrupts one’s dream or life plan. The story rolls very fast and excitingly under the driving of these tensions. Is it a great miniature of life? Although the story is very old, it feels modern and contemporary. I believe this is due to the questions the epic tries to discuss are so deep and fundamental that they remain more or less the same even after thousands of years, remaining unsolved and unfathomable. So people still need to think about them all the time.
What is quite unexpected is lots of coincidence with biblical stories. I’m not sure whether it is the creation of the TV drama director, or it is written in the original epic. There is a scene where the avatar, called Krishna, of one of the three gods, called Vishnu, split a pond, when he first enters the story line (see the screenshot above). This is clearly the same as the story of Moses in the Book of Exodus.
