Came across this passage in Les Mis that was interesting in light of our conversation about education and inherent good. It underscores for me that the impact of prison is a central issue in both Count of Monte Cristo and Les Mis. There was in Toulon a school conducted by monks which offered elementary instruction to those unfortunates who were willing to accept it. Valjean was among them. He went there when he was forty and learned to read, write, and calculate, with the feeling that to improve his mind was to fortify his hatred. There are circumstances in which education and enlightenment can become an extension of evil. The sad fact must be recorded that having condemned society as the cause of his misfortune, he took it upon himself to pass judgment on the Providence which had created society, and this, too, he condemned. Thus during those nineteen years of torture and enslavement his spirit both grew and shrank. Light entered on one side and darkness on the other. As we have seen, he was not bad by nature; he had been still virtuous when he was sent to prison. There he learned to condemn society and felt himself becoming evil; he condemned Providence and knew that he became impious. It is difficult at this moment not to pause for a moment to reflect. Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof? Is there not in every human soul, and was there not in the soul of Jean Valjean, an essential spark, an element of the divine, indestructible in this world and immortal in the next, which goodness can preserve, nourish, and fan into glorious flame, and which evil can never quite extinguish?
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 01:37:39 +0000
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