Author: Mark J. Chmiel

So Be It!

“They say:  sufferings are misfortunes,” said Pierre.  “But if at once, this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should…

Responding to a Pogrom

Violence was much on Tolstoy’s mind. Some eight months before Bryan’s visit a terrible pogrom against the Jews had occurred in Kishinyov. Horrified by this event, Tolstoy readily lent his name to a protest signed…

The Way It Looked in 1908

What  you  are  doing,  you  do  not  for  the  people  but  for  yourselves,  to  retain  the  position  you  occupy,  a  position  you  consider  advantageous  but  which  is  really  a  most  pitiful  and  abominable  one.  So …

Like Being in Warsaw in 1941

Merely to know that somewhere, far away, there are men who torture other men by inflicting all sorts of humiliations and inhuman degradations and sufferings on them; and for three months constantly to look on…

Neo-Pagan Elites

No longer able to believe in the Church religion, which had betrayed its own lie, and unable to adopt the true Christian teaching, which denied their entire life, these wealthy and powerful people, being left…

Keep It Simple

The goal of human life is constructing an architecture of the soul. –Simone Weil, quoted in Gabriella Fiori, Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography

Circle of Influence

Men need but understand this: they need but stop troubling themselves about external and general matters, in which they are not free, and use but one hundredth part of the energy, which they employ on…

DIY

If men would but keep from ruining their own lives, and keep from expecting someone from outside to come and help them – either Christ on the clouds, with the flourish of trumpets, or some…