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Solidaridad/3
It Was Love at First Haiku Maria told me to contact you When you were fresh back from El Salvador And perhaps needing another shoulder to lean on After re-entering this meshugah militarized greed culture…
Why Read Dostoevsky
It was never my goal to put together a collection of horror stories, to overwhelm the reader. I was collecting the human. Dostoevsky asked the question: “How much of the human is there in a…
Forthwith!
All we can know is, what we, who compose humanity, must do, and what not, in order that the kingdom of God may come. That we all know. And every one need but begin to…
Tolstoy’s Feedback for Dostoevsky
“Just recently I was feeling unwell and read House of the Dead. I had forgotten a good bit, read it over again and I do not know a better book in all our new literature,…
Minute Particulars
Active love is always directed at somebody or something in particular. Abstract love of humanity is professed by Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor, by Rakitin, and eventually by Ivan Karamazov’s devil. When it comes to meeting…
Precepts and Parables
Of all the gospels, the Sermon on the Mount was the portion that impressed me most, and I studied it more often than any other part. Nowhere else does Christ speak with such solemnity; nowhere…
Reveling in Resentment
The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than any one. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him,…
Russians Reciting Poetry as Prayer
Countless former prisoners described how memorized verse consoled them. It preserved their past life and their continuity with it. And it was something the authorities could not take away. Once stories about prisoners reciting poetry…
An Incomplete and Ever-expanding List of the Horrible (and Often Absurd) Beauty of It All by Yael
Ram Dass in Risk Being Human talk: “…and I began to expand my awareness to be able to look at the universe as it is and see the horrible beauty of it all…” An incomplete…
Liam Nesson in “Taken,” For Instance
If you think of something you wouldn’t want to happen to you, or to someone you love, then you’ll have thought of something worth staging or filming.–Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre In Defense…