For the Feast of John the Baptist: this extremely good essay by Wendell Berry; highly recommended. Proof - as if it were needed - that the Magisterium of the Church resides not in the priesthood - which is almost always wrong - but in the Prophets. As it was, is now, and ever shall be.
But [...]
A literal translation of the poem mentioned so often in The Brothers Karamazov, source of the phrase “sticky little leaves.” Translation by Stephen Boykewich.
The cold winds are still blowing
And carrying the morning frost.
The first little flowers
Have just appeared through the spring thaw holes,
As though from some miraculous, waxy kingdom,
The first bee has flown out
Of its [...]
Kerouac’s first marriage: he married a girl and moved out to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and worked at his father-in-law’s ball-bearings factory. It lasted two months:
At home Edie and her mother, anxious to see Jack as a competent husband, were alarmed that he spent most of his free time in the bathroom, reading Shakespeare and the [...]
Apparently a new edition of her book The Second Sex is out (rather substance-free review from Salon here). I found the book in a friend’s house a few weeks ago, and devoured a few hundred pages of it before my visit ended. It’s dazzlingly intelligent and endlessly fascinating; I read it as perhaps it is [...]
Let me start with the end of the first chapter of The Brothers Karamazov:
Finally she fled the house and ran away from Fyodor Pavlovich with a destitute seminarian, leaving the three-year-old Mitya in his father’s hands. Fyodor Pavlovich immediately set up a regular harem in his house and gave himself to the most unbridled drinking. [...]
“The railroad is to travel what the whore is to love. Just as comfortable, and just as horribly mechanical and fatally monotonous.” - Tolstoy, in a letter to Turgenev.
! This man’s capacity to shock and horrify me - while being ever-so-civilized - never seems to end. Calling whores “monotonous”!
“They played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata,” he continued. “Do you know the first presto? You do?” he cried. “Ugh! Ugh! It is a terrible thing, that sonata. And especially that part. And in general music is a dreadful thing. What is it? I don’t understand it. What is music? What does it do? And why does [...]
“Go round the shops in any big town. There are goods worth millions and you cannot estimate the human labor expended on them, and look whether in nine-tenths of these shops there is anything for the use of men. All the luxuries of life are demanded and maintained by women.
“Count all the factories. An enormous [...]
Tolstoy is a figure I have always kept at arm’s length; beyond reading Anna Karenina (easily the greatest novel ever written; really no other deserves to be put in the same paragraph with it; I hated it) and the most famous short stories, I have mostly avoided him. That he was full of hatred and [...]
From Dostoevsky.
25-Jun-10The conclusions of one of the revolutionaries in Demons:
“I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea I start out from. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution to the social problem, there is no other.”