Brothers Karamazov Revisited @ ThinkBlog

I have the book Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky on my "to read list" (though I can't remember why or where I first noticed him) so this post from ThinkBlog caught my eye. Looks like The Brothers Karamazov could find its way to that same list. The following is an excerpt from the post. (The first paragraph is a quotation from the book)

Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.

Such a good word. I have thought much of David's sorrow over the prospect of losing his son; or, more broadly, on the ancient Jewish customs of grief at large. Namely, there is a set period of mourning, and then it's over with. You move on. You stop complaining and worrying and fussing over it. You are able to look back on X time in your life and you remember that you have fully grieved the loss, whatever it is, and so do not need to continue to be sad. What an enormous insight into the nature of depressive psychology, and how true! (continue this post reading here...)

I thought this was interesting. I'd wondered before about the times for mourning observed by Biblical figures but it never really occurred to me why it might have been customary to mourn the death of a person death for such a specific number of days.