By Little and Little
One makes a better world by what Dostoevsky liked to call “microscopic actions.” When you walk down the street, Zossima tells the other monks, don’t scowl. A kindly look can shift a person’s mood and…
Category: World Literature
Take Charge
Mr. Elphinston talked of a new book that was much admired, and asked Dr. Johnson if he had read it. JOHNSON: “I have looked into it.” “What (said Elphinston) have you not read it through?” …
Blissful and Blithe
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…
Beware/Be Aware of Anger
The maxim which Periander of Corinth, one of the seven sages of Greece, left as a memorial of his knowledge and benevolence, was χολου κρατει, Be master of thy anger. He considered anger as the…
While Browsing The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English, I Came across This Entry…
Joyce, James (Augustine, Aloysius) (1882-1941) … Upon graduating in 1902, Joyce left for Paris where he lived in poverty, ostensibly studying medicine, actually reading his way through the literature section of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
For Example, The Brothers Karamazov, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, and The Diamond Sutra
“I don’t deny it,” answered Swann in some bewilderment. “The fault I find with our newspapers is that they force us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only…
What Came First
I was reading C.K. Williams’s book On WhitmanSeptember 2010And I scribbled on page 97 these three.. A NameAn AvowalA Maxim– Kelly McBride“You Are My Hero”Seven times down, eight times up The “Hero” referenceI’d first scribbled…
It Takes Countless Rendezvous in the Darkroom
Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated — the only life in consequence of which can be said to be really lived – is literature, and life thus defined is in a sense…
A Classic Is a Book That Has Never Finished Saying What It Has to Say
The moral compass of Les Misérables thus spreads far beyond the history, geography, politics and economics of the world in which its story is set. The novel achieves the extraordinary feat of being at the…
Dear Anya
Thank you for your cool list of queries which I saw after I got back from vacation at Blue-Eye, Missouri! I will start with an easy one: “Favorite Book”— The Brothers Karamazovby Fyodor Dostoevskyas translated by…