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,…
Category: World 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…
Some of Jack’s Dharma
Practice recognition of complete emptiness of all things at all times, under every condition, everywhere, and you will learn by yourself what Buddha preached. Free from Desire: What I really only want, what Ma’s given…
Sooner or Later, We All Know Somebody Like This
“… and you know I’m not a father who goes around bragging about his kids–but on the subject of Beilke …” Tevye, in Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, translated by Hillel Halkin
Forgetting the Sufi Three-Gate Rule
Awkward and Embarrassing Things You happen to say something rude about someone, and a child who overhears it repeats your words in front of the person concerned.— Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, translated by Meredith McKinney…
Both/And
Like other works, [Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets] is concerned with the nature, and, more importantly, the limits of human achievement. It assumes what its surrounding works assume: The continuity and dignity of the…
Look up!
“Do you look at the stars a lot? Do you know them? Plato said that sight is not truly precious unless it helps us to know the stars, the planets, the moon, and the sun….