The Illicit Happiness Of Other People
there is (sadly) nothing especially laughable about the problems unfolding in the world’s richest countries. People may not starve, life expectancy is high and child mortality almost eradicated, but populations remain beleaguered. The issues are not the sob stories of the well-to-do, begging for sympathy on account of an incorrectly chilled wine, b
... See moreAlain De Botton • The School of Life: An Emotional Education
It struck him that he’d never been so happy, but was wise enough to understand that his happiness consisted largely of hope. Their meeting in the ruin had been intimate and strange, and had sustained his spirit for days; but quickly they’d reverted to their easy pretence of being boys with a mystery on their hands. So they spoke only of where Maria
... See moreSarah Perry • Enlightenment
In his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy writes, of the terminally ill Ivan: “The syllogism . . . ‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,’ had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. . . . He was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from
... See moreGeorge Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
