He spent all his time at his window, watching the children playing in the prison yard.
But when he was in prison, he had a strange affection for them. I knew a criminal in prison who had, in the course of his career as a burglar, murdered whole families, including several children. Children while they are quite little-up to seven, for instance-are so remote from grown-up people they are different creatures, as it were, of a different species. And observe, cruel people, the violent, the rapacious, the Karamazovs are sometimes very fond of children. The innocent must not suffer for another's sins, and especially such innocents! You may be surprised at me, Alyosha, but I am awfully fond of children, too. If they, too, suffer horribly on earth, they must suffer for their fathers' sins, they must be punished for their fathers, who have eaten the apple but that reasoning is of the other world and is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on earth. Are you fond of children, Alyosha? I know you are, and you will understand why I prefer to speak of them. But the children haven't eaten anything, and are so far innocent. The second reason why I won't speak of grown-up people is that, besides being disgusting and unworthy of love, they have a compensation-they've eaten the apple and know good and evil, and they have become 'like gods.' They go on eating it still. But, in the first place, children can be loved even at close quarters, even when they are dirty, even when they are ugly (I fancy, though, children never are ugly). Still we'd better keep to the children, though it does weaken my case. That reduces the scope of my argument to a tenth of what it would be. I meant to speak of the suffering of mankind generally, but we had better confine ourselves to the sufferings of the children. I simply wanted to show you my point of view. If it were as on the stage, in the ballet, where if beggars come in, they wear silken rags and tattered lace and beg for alms dancing gracefully, then one might like looking at them. One can love one's neighbours in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it's almost impossible. Beggars, especially genteel beggars, ought never to show themselves, but to ask for charity through the newspapers.
And so he deprives me instantly of his favour, and not at all from badness of heart. Besides, there is suffering and suffering degrading, humiliating suffering such as humbles me-hunger, for instance-my benefactor will perhaps allow me but when you come to higher suffering-for an idea, for instance-he will very rarely admit that, perhaps because my face strikes him as not at all what he fancies a man should have who suffers for an idea. Why won't he admit it, do you think? Because I smell unpleasant, because I have a stupid face, because I once trod on his foot. And what's more, a man is rarely ready to admit another's suffering (as though it were a distinction). Another can never know how much I suffer, because he is another and not I. Suppose I, for instance, suffer intensely. To my thinking, Christ-like love for men is a miracle impossible on earth. The question is, whether that's due to men's bad qualities or whether it's inherent in their nature. "Well, I know nothing of it so far, and can't understand it, and the innumerable mass of mankind are with me there.
But yet there's a great deal of love in mankind, and almost Christ-like love. "Father Zossima has talked of that more than once," observed Alyosha "he, too, said that the face of a man often hinders many people not practised in love, from loving him. For anyone to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone." I am convinced that he did that from 'self-laceration,' from the self-laceration of falsity, for the sake of the charity imposed by duty, as a penance laid on him. I once read somewhere of John the Merciful, a saint, that when a hungry, frozen beggar came to him, he took him into his bed, held him in his arms, and began breathing into his mouth, which was putrid and loathsome from some awful disease. It's just one's neighbours, to my mind, that one can't love, though one might love those at a distance. "I could never understand how one can love one's neighbours.
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