Hergest Ridge

“You’re not Dostoevsky,” said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev.
“Well, who knows, who knows,” he replied.
“Dostoevsky’s dead,” said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.
“I protest!” Behemoth exclaimed hotly. “Dostoevsky is immortal!”

– Excerpt from Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.

This reminds me – I’ve to read Dostoevsky and see Russia. Urgently.

“What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? After all, shadows are cast by objects and people. There is the shadow of my sword. But there are also shadows of trees and living creatures. Would you like to denude the earth of all the trees and all the living beings in order to satisfy your fantasy of rejoicing in the naked light? You are a fool.”

– Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”
– Oscar Wilde

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson. You find the present tense and the past perfect.

– Unknown.

I just finished The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho – the quotation above comes from one of its last pages where it resides with a few others.

As usual with a good book, from my reading I’ve scribbled a few pages of excerpts on gridded paper. I write in the books I own directly these days, highlighting left and right, but when reading in electronic format, I just copy out the parts that I find most intriguing.

I used to try and keep the books pristine looking – like they just came from a bookshop – but now I think it’s much better to be able to leaf through it, and at a glance see the parts that’ve made the biggest impression. It also personalises my copy in a way that might say something about me, which I’ve not yet learned to express. (It’s like an economy of words where the words of others are left to describe me, while I’m left to pursue other things.)

“Man lebte wie ein Taucher unter der Glasglocke im schwarzen Ozean dieses Schweigens und wie ein Taucher sogar, der schon ahnt, dass das Seil nach der Außenwelt abgerissen ist und er nie zurückgeholt werden wird aus der lautlosen Tiefe.

Es gab nichts zu tun, nichts zu hören, nichts zu sehen, überall und ununterbrochen war um einen das Nichts, die völlig raumlose und zeitlose Leere. Man ging auf und ab, und mit einem gingen die Gedanken auf und ab, auf und ab, immer wieder. Aber selbst Gedanken, so substanzlos sie scheinen, brauchen einen Stützpunkt, sonst beginnen sie um sich selbst zu kreisen; auch sie ertragen nicht das Nichts. Man wartete auf etwas, von morgens bis abends, und es geschah nichts. Man wartete, wartete, man dachte, dachte, man dachte, bis einem die Schläfen schmerzten.

Nichts geschah. Man blieb allein. Allein. Allein.”

– Schachnovelle, Stefan Zweig

“The reasons to doubt the existence of God are in plain view for everyone to see: everyone can see that the Bible is not the perfect word of an omniscient deity; everyone can see that there is no evidence for a God who answers prayers and that any God who would grant prayers for football championships, while doling out cancer and car accidents to little boys and girls, is unworthy of our devotion. Everyone who has eyes to see can see that if the God of Abraham exists, He is an utter psychopath—and the God of Nature is too. If you can’t see these things just by looking, you have simply closed your eyes to the realities of our world.”

Excerpt from the Afterword to Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris.

 
“Oh wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound:
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound.”
 
– Richard Fulke Greville

I’ve retweeted without shame, but what about reblogging? Are retweets and reblogs just another way of saying “Hey, look: I’ve plagiarised this”?

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best — ” and then he had to stop and think. Because although eating honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.

What is that feeling called?

Maybe then I can finally explain it to others, those that offer me strange glances when I happen to mention it in conversation somewhere between “my dog died” and “the broken leg is not healing right – the doctors will have to break it again.”

Anyway, reblogged from monicks: unleashed, who – judging by her blog and to put it in Woody Allen’s words – is a credit to our race.