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February 8, 2007
for the love of god
It’s torture to hear ‘for the love of God’ and pass by, and not give anything, and say to him ‘god will give to you.’ Another ‘for the love of god’ is nothing in comparison. One is long, drawn-out, habitual, memorized, quite beggarly; it’s not such a torture not to give to this one, this is a long-term beggar who’s been doing it for ages, a beggar by trade, this one is used to it, you think, he’ll survive and knows how to survive. Yet another ‘for the love of God’ is unaccustomed, crude, frightening-just like today, when I was about to take the boy’s note, there was someone standing right there by the fence, and he wasn’t asking everyone, he says to me: ‘Give me a coin, sir, for the love of God!’- and in such an abrupt, crude voice that some dreadful feeling made me shudder, but I didn’t give him a coin: I didn’t have one. And rich people don’t like it either when poor men complain about their hard lot- ‘they’re a nuisance’, they say, ‘they’re importunate’ -and poverty is always importunate: do their hungry groans stop them sleeping, or something?
Dostoevsky - Poor People
Posted by amin at February 8, 2007 12:16 AM