Rishita Chaudhary

• Elena Ferrante writes primarily about women, focusing on the small details of their lives, their relationships with each other, their friendships, and, particularly, their maternal relationships—examining both the mother's and the daughter's perspectives. She explores the hidden violences in society and repression, but her novels are also filled

Zielschmerz n. the exhilarating dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you created in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could, only to break in case of emergency.

There are two modes of experience: appreciative, and evaluative.
Concrete example: let's say you're listening to a piece of music. Are you sinking into it, awash in emotions? You're in the appreciative mode.

Are you the mixing engineer, listening to the snare hits to make sure they're consistent? You're in the evaluative mode.

Much of sanity, and

But 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