Audrey > Recent Status Updates

“When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving concept of ‘greatness.’ ‘Greatness,’ it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the ‘great’ man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a ‘great’ man can be blamed.”

“A man in motion always devises an aim for that motion. To be able to go a thousand miles he must imagine that something good awaits him at the end of those thousand miles. One must have the prospect of a promised land to have the strength to move.”

“Raw space is a panther, feral and primal. They dream it stalking through their quarters.”

No one writes death like Tolstoy. Wow.

Oh no Sónya 🥲

The comparison of abandoned Moscow to an empty beehive and the proceeding death of Vereshchágin at the hands of the crowd—wow. Tolstoy, once again, has left me speechless.

Ugh wow. Tolstoy is killing me with Prince Andrew’s inner monologues. Also so fascinating to see Tolstoy’s own philosophy of war take clearer and clearer shape as the years of his life and the chapters of this book go by. Whew.

I would pay so much money to see Tolstoy’s reaction to a Rothko

“. . .the innumerable people who took part in the war acted in accord with their personal characteristics, habits, circumstances, and aims. They were moved by fear or vanity, rejoiced or were indignant, reasoned, imagining that they knew what they were doing and did it of their own free will, but they all were involuntary tools of history. . .the higher they stand in the social hierarchy the less are they free.”

“The unquestioned apotheosis of all this industrious building is to make the world fully comprehensible to humans. To find the utility in everything.”

“There is no such thing as neutrality in war: in practice one must help one side or the other. . .By revolution we become more ourselves, not less. There is no question of stopping short, striking a compromise, salvaging ‘democracy’, standing still. Nothing ever stands still.”

“To understand Fascism they would have had to study the theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system by which they lived was unjust, inefficient, and out of date. But it was exactly this fact that they had trained themselves never to face.” (The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius)