Day: December 31, 2022
Give and take
Too much talking wears the listener out
Keep silent then until you feel no doubt.
Learn how you can take in what they say
But don’t reply until another day
Incontinence in)2 speech can overwhelm
We can drown the other with our tongue.
If you go dumb because you feel deep grief
Emulate the insect on its leaf
Your words will not destroy your
anger’s good.
Chew your meat, for you will taste no blood
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Vasily Grossman: Loser, Saint | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/vasily-grossman-loser-saint
There are echoes here of the sclerotic cruelties, mass killing and frightened conformity of Putin’s Russia, which makes Life and Fate especially compelling now. But Grossman’s portrait is timelessly relevant. Tolstoy refused to describe War and Peace as either novel or history; it explained an era. Grossman does the same, illuminating why people are moved to savagery or sacrifice.
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Nobody should be sacrificed to transcendent ideals
D
Ikonnikov’s fierce conclusion is that there are no transcendent schemes for which people should be sacrificed. These ideals are delusions. “Those who most wish for the good of humanity are unable to diminish evil by one jot.”
There are echoes here of the sclerotic cruelties, mass killing and frightened conformity of Putin’s Russia, which makes Life and Fate especially compelling now. But Grossman’s portrait is timelessly relevant. Tolstoy refused to describe War and Peace as either novel or history; it explained an era. Grossman does the same, illuminating why people are moved to savagery or sacrifice.
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Mental lexicon
His mental lexicon was full of words
Though very few of them were ever heard
He made up sentences inside his head
Before he went to sleep in a strange bed
But no one ever shared his own bedstead m
He might have wished for marriage, never said
He was extremely shy so we observe
H never got the happiness deserved
How my heart sings 