More specifically concerning: tolstoy
classy
9 August 2006, around 10.43.
At the long dinner table laid in the garden were the various traveling guests, the grown-up daughters, and the younger children with their governess. The countess presided over the usual European dinner served by men, but the count and the daughter, who had worked all day in the fields, ate only porridge and black bread […]
prosopopoeia
17 March 2021, around 5.26.
The question is, of course, whether a writer genuinely reveals anything, and whether a reader can discover what it is. —Philip Rousseau (‘Knowing Theodoret: Text and Self’, p. 277) 1 It is difficult to know how to read books about psychosis. Unless one has also experienced abnormal mental states, sympathy – in the sense of […]
apprehension
6 April 2021, around 5.20.
Tolstoy takes on the magic of secret languages.
rust unburnish’d
10 October 2021, around 18.17.
The sort of lazy Sunday on which one has to work because one was having a sort of lazy Friday and a lazy Saturday, but Monday will come with its deadlines, and one does not like to disappoint. Somehow, last week, I managed to write my to-do list on the wrong day in my planner, […]
in brief
28 June 2025, around 17.14.
The thing with setting a goal – say, of posting every day when one has gotten out of the habit – is that the structure takes on a life of its own. It makes demands. It imposes itself. Sometimes it becomes an imposition, and one can only stand so many pairs of photographs and quotations in […]
planavorel
11 September 2025, around 17.12.
It might have happened. I might have reached the stage of having too many reading projects. I say this because, as I worked through my morning books before starting the work day, nothing seemed like it was part of or in service of anything. While I was mildly amused by some of the books, a […]