Author: Mark J. Chmiel

Up to Me

Let us cease to consider what, perhaps, may never happen, and what, when it shall happen, will laugh at human speculation. We will not endeavour to modify the motions of the elements, or to fix…

Stolen at Gunpoint

I’m grateful to have come across Kari’s kind correspondence in a file this evening. Dear Mark,  I just wanted to drop you a note to thank you for taking the time to write The Book…

By Little and Little

All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant…

Share the Wealth

It is the duty of every man to endeavour that something may be added by his industry to the hereditary aggregate of knowledge and happiness. To add much can indeed be the lot of few,…

Dr. Samuel Johnson

Harold: You sure have a way with people.Maude: Well, they’re my species!—Harold and Maude, 1971 film He was no philosopher of abstractions as were Berkeley, Descartes, Kant. He was a moral philosopher, perhaps, a moralist…

Talk Less, Act Better

A living example often can have a stronger effect than thousands of theoretical teachings and rules.–Chan Khong Example is more efficacious than precept.–Samuel Johnson

Is This How It Will Be?

Yet we to whom the shortness of life has given frequent occasions of contemplating mortality, can, without emotion, see generations of men pass away, and are at leisure to establish modes of sorrow, and adjust…

Avoid Being Scattered

 But the fate of learned ambition is a proper subject for every scholar to consider; for who has not had occasion to regret the dissipation of great abilities in a boundless multiplicity of pursuits, to…

Not Now… But Someday

[Soviet critics] conceded that much of what [Vasily] Grossman had written was true, but to publish the novel at such a time would be harmful to the state. Marlov or Sartakov suggested that publication might…