Sublime

He had the same aristocratic sense of equality with all living creatures and the same gift of taking in everything at a glance and of expressing his thoughts as they first came to him and before they had lost their meaning and vitality.

Because even if my back were already half flayed, that mountain still wouldn’t move at my word or cry.

He longed to shout to him and to the people in the railway coach that salvation lay not in loyalty to forms but in throwing them off.

Crime and the whole way of looking at it would then undoubtedly have to change, little by little, of course, not all at once, not immediately, but still quite soon …

Chekhov and Tolstoy,

так и вызначилась во всем пустая природа мужчины, природа грубая, тяжелая, не способная ни к домостроительству, ни к сердечным убеждениям, маловерная, ленивая, исполненная беспрерывных сомнений и вечной боязни.

Why, why had he left? Why had the elder sent him “into the world”? Here was quiet, here was holiness, and there—confusion, and a darkness in which one immediately got lost and went astray …

His vision unclear, the Consul ripped open Hoyt’s sweat-sodden shirt, casting the rags aside. It was there, of course, lying under the pale skin of Hoyt’s chest like some great, raw, cross-shaped worm. The Consul took a breath and gently turned the priest over. The second cruciform was where he had expected to find it, a slightly smaller, cross-sha

metempsychosis,