Audrey > Recent Status Updates

“For the adversary having been proved ineffective in open persecutions now exercises a hidden skill in doing cruel hurt, in order to overthrow by the stumbling-block of pleasure those whom he could not strike with the blow of affliction. . .he grieves at the shedding of Christian blood being forbidden, and attacks the mode of life of those whose death he cannot compass.” — St. Gregory the Great, Homily 36

Tolstoy is my favorite accidental comedian, I love him so much

“We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born. . .It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers—that is to say, as markets.”

“We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing.”

“Once a technology is admitted, it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do. Our task is to understand what that design is—that is to say, when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open.”

“Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?”

So very haunting to re-read this book in the age of AI and techno-solutionism 🥲

“Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought! . . .Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?”

So very haunting to re-read this book in the age of AI & techno-solutionism 🥲

“To imagine a man perfectly free and not subject to the law of inevitability, we must imagine him all alone, beyond space, beyond time, and free from dependence on cause.”

As I finish War and Peace, I would like to thank:

(1) My cinnamon tea, which fueled my eyeballs to read these 600,000 words

(2) My cat, to whom I ranted endlessly about Prince Andrei and Nikolai

(3) Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia, who edited this beast

“You love him?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you crying?”

—

I am not mentally prepared for this book to be over 😭

“That dreadful question, ‘What for?’ which had formerly destroyed all his mental edifices, no longer existed for him. To that question, ‘What for?’ a simple answer was now always ready in his soul: ‘Because there is a God, that God without whose will not one hair falls from a man’s head.’”

“She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the later of slime that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, delicate young shoots of grass were already sprouting, which taking root would so cover with their living verdure the grief that weighed her down that it would soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound had begun to heal from within.”