Tolstoy was always the moralist disguised as a storyteller. He couldn’t so much as describe a hayfield without planting in it a parable, and How Much Land Does a Man Need? is among his most ruthless little lessons. At its heart, it’s an absurdly simple tale: a peasant named Pahom believes that with just a … Continue reading How Much Land Does a Man Need? – Tolstoy’s Six-Foot Sermon
Tag: philosophy
We: A Sermon in Glass and Giggles
f you ever wake up in the morning and think, 'Life would be so much better if everyone behaved exactly the same,' then I recommend you either take a cold shower, or read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. For here's a book that takes the notion of a perfectly ordered society and runs it to its logical conclusion … Continue reading We: A Sermon in Glass and Giggles
Winter’s Gibbet: A Scaffold Without a Show
“A scaffold without a show, a sermon without words. Here absence hangs heavier than any corpse.” - Me The trouble with gibbets is that they're both too much and not enough. Too much when they hold their grisly trophies aloft for the crows; not enough when they stand bare against the horizon, gaunt as a … Continue reading Winter’s Gibbet: A Scaffold Without a Show
Dreams That Wander Too Far: From Plato to The Further
Cinema, despite its thunderous claims to originality, is in truth a great necromancer. It raises the dead more often than it invents the living, and its spirits wear borrowed costumes even when paraded as new. When James Wan and Leigh Whannell conjured Insidious, they weren’t scribbling out some pristine mythology in a Hollywood boardroom but … Continue reading Dreams That Wander Too Far: From Plato to The Further
The Forgotten Divinity: On The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
“Great Pan is not dead, but sleeping; and the reed shall sound again at the hour of need.” - Adapted from Plutarch It’s a curious feature of English children’s literature that its most enchanting works are often its most subversive. Carroll slipped logic puzzles and ontological riddles into Alice; Tolkien smuggled Catholic theology into hobbit … Continue reading The Forgotten Divinity: On The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Wording 