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And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’
Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that
What I Recalled Watching Netflix
[Television is educational.] One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain
Seeking the King
A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do
He’s the Guy
Those social media posts of ‘this moment in this famous film was totally unscripted!!!’ as if that by itself makes it better miss the point. Moat unscripted material, like most ideas, inventions, ideas, notions, &c … fails — such is the nature of creativity: the best stuff, it is devoutly to be wished, sticks around;
Random
Sadie! Sadie!
Hadda dream that Zadie Smith asked me to babysit two kittens. She and her husband, an older Jewish man, had somewhere to go. He was involved in classical music of some kind, possibly a conductor or composer; seemed like a nice guy. One cat was incontinent, one only inconvenient … Zadie and her mensch were
Kingdom In
When we hear of our twinclinations — the two tendencies within us all, one toward good and one toward ill — most time is spent on the first. Anyway I’ve spent most of my time on that — on being most concerned over time with what’s good and am I being that, and often justifying what doesn’t
In the Beginning Were the Words
Alpha and Omega 1:1 In the beginning were the words. The words were the poet’s, and later the priest’s. And the words the poet wrote were that Malcolm Bodwell was, “rapacious and repulsive and a fat gloating suet goat of a boy (not man) engorging himself on peat and stone and dregsy water
Ensamples
Among the worst things about The Slap is how it has fed self-righteousness in all but the two participants, and they already had it or it wldn’t have happened. But there is Solzhenitsyn, again, with the line between good and evil that cuts through every human heart, and there is Dostoevsky, always, reminding us via