“Pleased to Meet You, Hope You Guess My Name”
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy…
Category: World Literature
Today’s One-Liner (#234)
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” —William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Soulwork
“One big thing is to develop a strenuous accountability (you see it’s moral, no gadgets invade man’s true necessity), and the habit, the daily labor of writing en passant, keep a vast and cosmic diary….
It’s Not Everyday Your Soul Gets Restored
“Rakitin,” [Alyosha Karamazov] suddenly said loudly and firmly, “don’t taunt me with having rebelled against my God. I don’t want to hold any anger against you, and therefore you be kinder, too. I’ve lost such…
A Different Perspective
A God-fearing Orthodox peasant talking about thieves, with a shrug of the shoulders, as one talks about a social necessity: “It’s a busy life—there’s always a shop or a bank to rob. And where would…
Today’s One-Liner (#224)
Mama, do not weep, life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the…
Kafka, Sholom Aleichem, Peretz
In this respect Sholom Aleichem and Peretz are more like Kafka than any of the three are like most modern writers. The Yiddish masters are largely unconcerned with the psychology of individual difference; Kafka…
Today’s One-Liner (#222)
You never know where the Angel of Death will make a date with you. –Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, Shprintze, 96
Bearing Witness
In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She…
Today’s One-Liner (#221)
This is the Akhmatova who, in a friend’s words, could not bear to see another person’s suffering, though she bore her own without complaint. –D. M. Thomas, Introduction to his translation of Anna Akhmatova, Selected…