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…
Category: World Literature
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…
Be Reasonable
Open your heart to the influence of the light which, from time to time, breaks in upon you: when scruples importune you, which you in your lucid moments know to be vain, do not stand…
Sitting
The night before I left, one of the patches containing painkiller came off, and Mev was in a lot of pain. She wet the bed twice, vomited once. For some reason, the alarm on the…
“Neither Do I Condemn You”: An On-going Collage
“God will punish all atheists. They will burn in everlasting fire.” [A hermit] Obviously upset, the Staretz said: “Tell me, supposing you went to paradise and looked down and saw somebody burning in hell-fire—would you…
Who Remained Decent?
So let us ask: who behaved better under pressure, imprisoned Bolsheviks or religious believers? Materialists or those who acknowledged absolute standards of good and evil? Who acted nobly and who behaved like a scoundrel? To…
Advice for Those Who Say They Want to Save the World
Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems…
An “Epic” Share the Wealth, with Andrew Ivers
My name is Andrew Ivers. I’m a freelance editor and have been friends with Mark since he was my teacher at SLU. For the last fifteen years I’ve been reading my way through great works…
The Path of the Prosaic
for Natalie Long Faith comes not from theory but from experience, from the bottom up, by living the right sort of life from moment to moment. For Zossima, that means attending to the prosaic. One…
Reading the Russians
In this book I portray the Russian tradition as a dialogue of the dead (and a few still living) extending over centuries. Novelists and their characters, critics and ideologists, argue about ultimate questions that obsessed…