Wonder confronts Certainty
When Montaigne arrives in the underworld, he tells Socrates a lot has changed since his time. As Socrates expresses delight, Montaigne explains the change has been for worse, and people have grown even more foolish.
When the Gods summon the great emperors to a boasting contest, Alexander, Caesar and Octavius each claim to be the greatest leader, but
... See moreDialogues of the dead differ from symposia of the living not only because people of different eras and cultures converse, but also because, as shades living posthumously, they no longer consider the life circumstances in which they speak. What they say can no longer benefit or harm them.
These Russian conversations import the freedom of dialogues of the dead into everyday life. In some liminal space - “a stinking tavern,” a train compartment, an inn at the crossroads - time seems suspended, and people talk about the depths of their souls as if they were already living outside time.
Each word is a portable cathedral in which we clarify and sanctify our experience, a reliquary and a laboratory, holding the history of our search for meaning and the pliancy of the possible future, of there being richer and deeper dimensions of experience than those we name in our surface impressions. In the roots of words we find a portal to the ... See more
Maria Popova • The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name
In Woolf's words, it made us ask: "But why live at all”
For those who had lost religious faith, Russian literature became the place to contemplate essentially religious questions, and for those who retained
it, Russian literature became a way to revitalize it.
And what have Russian boys [like us] been doing up till now, some of them, I mean? In this stinking tavern, for instance, here, they meet and sit down in a corner. They've never in their lives before and, when they go out of the tavern, they won't meet again for forty years. And what do they talk about in that momentary halt in the tavern? Of the e
... See moreBut the novels of Dostoevsky "are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn whirled round, blinded, suffogated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Outside of Shakespeare, there is no more exciting reading." Ultimately, Russians realize,
"we are souls, tortured, unhappy souls; whose only busine
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