Here and Now, This Is It
In another passage of the letter to his brother, he defines the ecstatic sense of life that he felt on being pardoned: “Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could be a lifetime…
Category: World Literature
La Rochefoucauld Nailed It
Le soleil ni la mort ne se peuvent regarder fixement. –Duc François De La RochefoucauldNeither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.–Leonard TancockMaxim #26
Yesterday, While Sitting in Barnes Jewish Hospital with Suzanne…
she shared her enthusiasm for the writer Niall Williams, and quoted from memory the opening line of his novel, On Earth As It Is in Heaven: “There are only three great puzzles in the world,…
Fading, Vanishing
All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble… They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This “outgrowing” proved on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher…
Carry on, Regardless
A man accustomed to vicissitudes is not easily dejected. —Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia Men seldom give pleasure, where they are not pleased themselves; it is necessary, therefore, to cultivate an habitual…
What Can You Say about Sei?
[She was] a complicated, intelligent, well-informed woman who was quick, impatient, keenly observant of detail, high-spirited, witty, emulative, sensitive to the charms and beauties of the world and to the pathos of things, yet intolerant…
Yammering
When people get together they are never silent for a moment. They will always talk. When you listen to what they say, a great deal of it is pointless. There is much harm and little…
Dostoevsky Saw It Coming
What would be “a thousand times more serious” is revolutionary killing such as Dostoevsky was to predict in The Possessed. This book, alone among nineteenth-century works, foresaw what we have come to call totalitarianism, not…
Focus
Depend on it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. —Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson There is no temper more unpropitious…
Welcome the Test
No man can form a just estimate of his own powers by unactive speculation. That fortitude which has encountered no dangers, that prudence which has surmounted no difficulties, that integrity which has been attacked by…