Bodhisattva/Neurotic
Allen wanted to see everything, do everything, and meet everyone. 267 Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg Recently, I have read biographies of Goethe and Proust. Today I finished…
Category: World Literature
Writing Matters
This much the outsider can make out. He looks at the harrowing of Pushkin, at Gogol’s despair, at Dostoevsky’s term in Siberia, at Tolstoy’s volcanic struggle against censorship, or at the long catalogue of the…
So Be It!
“They say: sufferings are misfortunes,” said Pierre. “But if at once, this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should…
Like Being in Warsaw in 1941
Merely to know that somewhere, far away, there are men who torture other men by inflicting all sorts of humiliations and inhuman degradations and sufferings on them; and for three months constantly to look on…
Neo-Pagan Elites
No longer able to believe in the Church religion, which had betrayed its own lie, and unable to adopt the true Christian teaching, which denied their entire life, these wealthy and powerful people, being left…
Two Alyoshas
Dostoevsky’s—There was something in him that told one, that convinced one (and it was so all his life afterwards) that he did not want to be a judge of men, that he would not take…
He Made an Impression
“God grant us more such Russian rogues,” Marya Dmitrievna suddenly mixed in vexedly. “He lived a week with us; we saw nothing but good from him,” she said. “Courteous, wise, just.” –Leo Tolstoy, Hadji…
The Miracle of Being Awake
Suddenly some force shoved him in the chest, in the side, choked his breath still more, he fell through the hole, and there, at the end of the hole, something lit up. What was done…
He Must Go on, He Can’t Go on, He’ll Go on
Everything was doomed [in 1943]: [Yankev Glatshteyn’s] people, his tradition, its language, his artistic freedom, his chances of contributing to a continuing literature. Even his awesome responsibility as the chronicler of the last days of…
One Reader May Suffice
Any author, [Marcel] Proust wrote Jaloux, should be happy to “write for a single, exquisite reader like you,” and he added a Proustian analogy comparing Jaloux’s contact with his book to pollen intended for “a…