Hana > Recent Status Updates

On Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China: Mao took the added precaution of checking everything Snow wrote afterwards, and amending and rewriting parts. On 26 July 1937 (before Red Star came out) Snow wrote to his wife...'Don't send me any more notes about people reneging on their stories to me...As it is, with so many things cut out it begins to read like Childe Harold'

Great interview with the author: http://www.failuremag.com/article/tra...

I cannot put this down! Terrifying.

Grim, unrelentingly bloody. I'm also starting to understand the reviewers who fault Chang and Halliday for their documentation. It's nearly impossible to figure out how the more controversial quotes or historical tidbits are sourced. Maybe this is to protect the innocent (or not so innocent) but it makes me a frustrated and doubt-filled reader.

Ch. 15: The carriage incident on Christmas eve. Okay, Emma, if you are so clever how are you going to get out of this mess (all of your own making)????

Drat. I can't renew this as someone else at my library has a request in for it. I'll move on to the grim tales of Mao and come back to the Gulag later.

Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of all the Moscow prisons we, too, former prisoners of war and former front line soldiers, watch the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks...'Oh, it's just a salute'--and then lay down again: 'And once again covered themselves with their coats'...That victory was not for us. And that spring was not for us either.

But when, through the density of evil action, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.

Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope.

Ideology--that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes....

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

What Darwin could not have known....Was Lamarck right after all--at least about one part of his theory? Is phenotypic variation at least as important as genotypic variation? If so, how is it transmitted?

Ah! Now this is more my mood! Pure escapist fantasy with a young heroine I liked from the first page. Plus it's set in the desert, which might be an improvement over Boston today at a humid 99 degrees. Istan, here I come!

I'm finding it hard to warm up to Queen Lucia. I've known several women like Lucia and I've always avoided them like the plague, though like the plague they are often hard to escape! I'm putting this aside for a day when I'm in a better mood and it's not 100 degrees and humid (Lucia probably wouldn't have broken a sweat).

"I had long since realized that each of us organizes memory as it suits him. I'm still surprised when I do it myself. But it surprised me that one could go so far as to give the facts an arrangement that went against one's own interest." [Every 20 or so pages Ferrante come up with some insight like this that partially redeems the dreadful story.]

Why doesn't Elena take her children away from the place and the people who are so destructive? Why am I still reading this book?

I've reached the incident of the chough egg. I wasn't sure what sort of bird a chough was, nor why it's nests were so dangerous to reach until I found this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaBEG...

Intelligence without traditions. I am so fed up with Elena. And Nino. And the mess that these people are making of their lives. Perhaps I'm even less tolerant because I've just finished War and Peace in which nearly everyone is infused with tradition--tradition that makes even illiterate peasants men of wisdom.

Adele nails it!
"What does it mean that Nino is intelligence without traditions?"
She looked at me ironically.
"That he's no one. And for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else. The result is that this Signor Sarratore is an unreliable person."
I, too, am an intelligence without traditions."
She smiled.
"Yes, you are, too, and in fact you are unreliable."

Tolstoy argues that the fires that burned much of Moscow were not deliberately set but spread accidentally from campfires. He makes a good case. Still, the extent of the damage is shocking. The dark areas are the parts that burned

...to hold on to the brilliant position the French army was in....on needed to do the simplest and easiest thing: to keep the army from looting, to provide a supply of winter clothing, of which there was enough in Moscow for the whole army, and to organize the collection of provisions for the whole army, of which...there was enough...for more than six months. Napoleon, that genius of geniuses...did none of that.

"For the first time, all that pure spiritual inner work, which she had so far lived by, emerged. All her inner work of discontent with herself, her suffering, her yearning for the good, obedience, love, self-sacrifice--all this now shone in those luminous eyes, in her fine smile, in every feature of her tender face." [OK Count Lyov Nikolayevich Tolstoy if you don't give this one a happy ending I give up on you!]

Kurtuzov has now taken full command of the Russian forces. He's the one historical figure who emerges from the shadows of Tolstoy's narrative.

Tolstoy is superb at conveying the fog of war--and the fog of political counsel surrounding war.

He stopped in mid-speech, lowered his eyes, so as not to see her unpleasantly irritated and irresolute face..."It's not to quarrel with you that I come today. On the contrary." All her irritation suddenly vanished, and her and her anxious, pleading eyes were directed at him in eager expectation. "I can always arrange it so that I see her rarely," thought Boris.

...A secret voice tells us that we should feel guilty for being idle. If a man could find a condition in which, while idle, he felt that he was being useful and fulfilling his duty, he would have found one side of primordial blessedness. And this state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is enjoyed by an entire class--the military.

Pierre was received in the nice new drawing room, in which it was impossible to sit down anywhere without violating the symmetry, cleanliness and order, and therefore it was quite comprehensible and not strange that Berg magnanimously suggested disturbing the symmetry of an armchair or a sofa for his dear guest, and obviously in a painful dilemma himself in this respect, left the resolving...to his guest's choice.

GR is sure making it hard to add updates. Oh well, so I'm back to being a newbie. Pevear and Volokhonsky are so helpful with lists of historical characters, chapter outlines, subheads with translations, guides to pronunciation, etc. I can't believe I've waited this long to read this classic.