nicole’s Reviews > Intermezzo > Status Update

Yes, the world makes room for goodness and decency, he thinks: and the task of life is to show goodness to others, not to complain about their failings.

She has lost sight of the brother Ivan has been describing, replacing him with herself, and therefore attributing to herself a greater understanding of his motives than she could possibly possess. Never having, after all, laid eyes on the man, whoever he is

… a vestige of evolutionary processes superseded by the development of the brain.”

“Nothing will, or even really can, go wrong. The physical anxiety that accompanies chess events – exhibition games, tournaments – does not bear any meaningful relationship to the events themselves, except a chronological one: it arrives beforehand and goes away afterwards. His mind knows this, but his body does not. For this and other reasons, Ivan considers the body a fundamentally primitive object,