Sero te amavi

Dostoevsky is part of my life, and not a year goes by without my going back into one of his works. I could not say what I look for there. What I bring back, on the other hand, is clear enough: for a few weeks after each reading, the world reaches me with a gain, as though the volume had been turned up on a frequency one does not usually hear. It always fades in the end. This year it was an Instagram feed that switched the set back on.

I give it far less time than I once did, and I post little. I scroll through my account now and then, without intent.

In the course of this wandering I am caught by the wide blue eyes of a young woman. They carry a form of light, even if its wavelength seems to be that of pain.

She tells her story on a programme whose video appears among the favourites on her profile. She has lost her husband, a brain tumour. She is left alone with a child of a very young age. Without artifice, almost detached, she describes the gradual loss of mobility, when the doctors had announced a remission that made a wild hope tangible, until the paraplegia. One senses the superhuman effort she must have made to appear serene to him, and more so still in front of their daughter. Smiling, while she knew he was living his last moments.

Then I look at the information on her profile, mechanically. Her first name is a form of that of the apostle who came late, the one who never walked beside the living Christ. Her surname is the Latin singular genitive of crux, which one might render as «she who comes from the cross». Her husband's initials are JC. Their daughter is called Madeleine. I note all this. A reader who spends time in those books ends up weaving connections everywhere, no longer knowing whether he finds them or lays them down.

The networks, for their part, have grasped that she came across wonderfully on air. The requests are many. She is not fooled, but she knows it serves a cause, that of funding for research. Beneath the videos are the comments, including the foulest, from those who rejoice that a cultivated and comfortable woman has been caught up with. I wanted to despise them, before remembering that Dostoevsky spent his life giving such people a voice from the inside, and that in his books the one who looks down on them is never the one who is right. Everyone takes something from her. The networks an audience, the coarse commenters a revenge, and I an etymology.

Reading on through her posts, I see her moments of doubt, which can be very violent. The pull of the abyss, with its enormous force of gravity, is nonetheless countered there, cancelled by the hand of a child who alone counterbalances the chasm.

The essential thing is not there, though. What truly surprised me is that she speaks often of her husband's beauty. She names his courage, his dignity, everything that is conferred on the dead to console ourselves for them, but it is to his beauty that she returns. Of a man she watched lose his legs, and then all the rest. The illness took nothing from what she saw. And it is a truth she has lived, one that fits within no frame, because it belongs to Love.

Prince Myshkin said that beauty will save the world. That sentence was much laughed at, within the novel itself, and those who quote it today have often read nothing else.

Fifteen centuries earlier, a man who had no chance of being read by Dostoevsky wrote very nearly the same thing, with more tenderness. Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova. Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new. Augustine was speaking of God. He might have been speaking of a face.

She speaks of the beauty of a man she watched die. She has read neither of them, I suppose. She only saw.