Today’s One-Liner (#225)
What I call “another sort of learning” is the finding and reading those seminal books that take us to the truth and order of things. ––James V. Schall, Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught
Category: Commonplace book
A Different Perspective
A God-fearing Orthodox peasant talking about thieves, with a shrug of the shoulders, as one talks about a social necessity: “It’s a busy life—there’s always a shop or a bank to rob. And where would…
Today’s One-Liner (#224)
Mama, do not weep, life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the…
Kafka, Sholom Aleichem, Peretz
In this respect Sholom Aleichem and Peretz are more like Kafka than any of the three are like most modern writers. The Yiddish masters are largely unconcerned with the psychology of individual difference; Kafka…
Today’s One-Liner (#222)
You never know where the Angel of Death will make a date with you. –Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, Shprintze, 96
Bearing Witness
In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She…
Today’s One-Liner (#221)
This is the Akhmatova who, in a friend’s words, could not bear to see another person’s suffering, though she bore her own without complaint. –D. M. Thomas, Introduction to his translation of Anna Akhmatova, Selected…
Be Wary
Once indiscriminate violence becomes welcome, is there any limit to that harm? Chekhov suggests: perhaps the greatest brutality comes from humane, well-educated idealists. –Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions And Why Their…
Today’s One-Liner (#220)
In mental prayer, shut your eyes, shut your mouth, and open your heart. –Saint John Vianney, quoted in Mother Teresa, Everything Starts from Prayer: Meditations on Spiritual Life for People of All Faiths, selected and…
Faith
Mother Teresa of Calcutta did not become an international icon of selfless generosity despite her belief in Jesus Christ, the only Son of God and the unique savior of the world; she lifted the wretched…