Today’s One-Liner (#60)

Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. –Staretz Zosima, “Of Prayer, Love, and the Touching of Other Worlds,” in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov Easter morning 2012, Chouteau AvenuePhoto by Andrew Wimmer

Thank You, Biographers!

Biography is, of the various kinds of narrative writing, that which is most eagerly read, and most easily applied to the purposes of life.  –Samuel Johnson, The Idler, 84 in A Johnson Sampler, edited by…

Appreciating Jack Appreciating

Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1940-1956, v. 1 As I’m convinced of the the utility of “pulling”* from my reading, I found the following gems in some of Kerouac’s letters up till  he had to deal…

One Kind Gesture

I am grateful to Gary Saul Morson, for his book that has engaged me over the last year, Wisdom Confronts Certainty, as well as many of his articles and essays. Thanks to Morson’s insights here…

Specks and Seeds

Incidentally, I have already mentioned that although he lost his mother in his fourth year, he remembered her afterwards all his life, her face, her caresses, “as if she were standing alive before me.” Such…

From Fyodor Dostoevsky to Thich Nhat Hanh

“Compassion will give meaning and understanding to Rogozhin himself. Compassion is the chief and perhaps only law of being  for all mankind.”—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot Please call me by my true name,so that I can…

Not the Pat Answer

Father Zosima then advises his suppliant, in some of the words that Father Ambrose of Optina Pustyn asked Dostoevsky to convey to Anna Grigoryevna: “Be not comforted. Consolation is not what you need. Weep and…