Chris > Recent Status Updates

I'm beginning to think that Tolstoy's high-minded preambles on the limits of scientific knowledge and the mysteries of human effort and understanding are just long-winded excuses for the utter implausibility of REPEATEDLY running into the same people in the vast spaces of Russia in times of catastrophic social convulsions.

Borodino!

All downhill from here.

Early 19th Century Russian nobility sure liked their dinner parties.

"Just remember, dear Friends: What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question."

"The vital interests of the state, which are always about power, have nothing to do with the vital interests of the citizens, which are private and simple and are always about a better life for themselves and their children. You do not kill for such interests, you work for them."

"'Not bad, these new times,' he said to me. 'Like an Issac Babel story, but not so funny.'"

"This is where I first hear 'Reification' in connection with the Gone Away War, and I hear it because Zaher Bey is demanding to know what the hell it is... Never let it be said that sociology is a useless discipline."

"The world we inhabit is balanced between the Sun and the inky gulf of space. If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all."

The fact that there was a Pope Zosimus (417-419 CE) is awesome.

"By the time I actually set foot on the place, my mind was already soggy with questions and answers, my soul was already marked by the scars and dripping with the juices of battle." Jesus.

Behold, the prose of Jim Lehrer: "Gramma Maude could not hear her because she was dead."

Exquisitely crafted and lovingly translated. But grim.

"On the wilder shores of the American 1960s, where rock fans and student radicals met, the line between getting stoned and building barricades often seemed hazy." Well played, professor.