2026-01 posts
Early October 1815, in the southern French town of Digne. A stranger—bald, bearded, carrying a worn sack and rough stick—knocked on Bishop Myriel’s door. He had walked twelve leagues that day, enduring insults and threats along the way. The Alpine night wind cut through the holes in his clothes, attacking him from all sides. He carried a yellow passport (the identifying document given to convicts on parole), 109 francs in savings, and a soul writhing in pain and hatred. Bishop Myriel welcomed the stranger. “You need not tell me who you are. This is not my house; it is the house of Jesus Christ. This door does not ask those who enter whether they have a name, but whether they...
“The first of the line is tied to a tree, and the last is being eaten by ants.” This haunting prophecy marks the beginning and the end of the Buendía family. But how are we to truly view this lineage? Across seven generations, the Buendías were a collection of remarkable souls: some were master craftsmen, some possessed an insatiable thirst for knowledge; others were shrewd, brave, or untiringly industrious. They carried a certain magnetic vitality—a fierce gaze and an unyielding spirit—that allowed them to conquer both battlefields and the hearts of formidable women. On the surface, the family seemed invincible. Yet, their entire existence spanned a mere century before the biblical wind swept them away, erasing their descendants and their...
Anna’s psychological monologue before her death stands as one of the nineteenth century’s most extraordinary pieces of psychological writing. It’s difficult to imagine what state Tolstoy must have been in while composing these passages. The voice recording these sentences seems to belong to Anna herself—and if we consider Anna’s suicide as the novel’s climax, then the figure standing at this peak, surveying everything below, is not Tolstoy but Death itself. The Shadow of Death The shadow of death hovers over the entire novel from its opening pages. We first encounter it when Anna and Vronsky meet for the first time, at the scene of a railway suicide. This is followed by Anna’s brush with death during childbirth, then Vronsky’s failed...
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”— George Orwell, 1984 My father once taught me that some thoughts are better left unspoken—kept safely in your heart. I believe this is a profound truth, and perhaps the reason many of us still live peacefully in this world. Yet we all know the pain of suppressing our thoughts, unable to express them. Sometimes they slip out unintentionally, or explode at an unexpected moment. If this were the world of 1984, congratulations—you’ve just committed thoughtcrime. “Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.” 1984 depicts an era that exists nowhere in particular time or space, yet the novel has become something many politicians fear. Its dystopian vision repeats...
The dilution of any spirit requires time and language to work their alchemy. Even masterpieces must bear the burden of misinterpretation—how much more so those concepts we don’t particularly cherish. Literary history abounds with such examples. Consider the old man sketched by Cervantes’ clever pen: perhaps more moving than any actual knight. A single scene can embody an entire ethos; caricature lodges deeper in the mind than epic verse. The image of Don Quixote tilting at windmills with his lance outweighs ten thousand tales of knights kneeling among roses, presenting monster heads to ladies on balconies. Chivalry became Sancho whistling as he led Rocinante by the reins. Cervantes’ prolonged jest transformed chivalry into a subject of ridicule. When Don Quixote...
One Anna Karenina can beat ten relationship columns. The world will always have a Kitty—pure and sweet; a Dolly—kept afloat by everyday warmth; and an Anna—drunk on desire. Men are a roll of the dice, and so is marriage.
In 1856, the old Tsar Nicholas I ended his life by poison, and Alexander II came to the throne. The reforms of the new reign stirred fresh public interest in the Decembrist Uprising—the failed revolt that had greeted Nicholas I’s accession. Tolstoy, always suspicious of authority and its symbols, disliked this renewed fascination with “digging up old relics.” Turgenev, ten years his senior, scolded him sharply in a letter. That exchange, ironically, awakened Tolstoy’s own curiosity about the period. He began to imagine a novel about the Decembrists returning from exile. Yet he soon discovered that to reveal what those men believed, he would have to return to 1825 and write the uprising itself. And to write 1825, he would...
There are books that wait for us, and there are books we must wait for. One Hundred Years of Solitude taught me the difference. When reading becomes a struggle—when the words resist you, when the pages feel like walls—don’t force it. Don’t push yourself through a work that refuses to open itself to you. Don’t wrestle with sprawling narratives that seem deliberately chaotic, don’t strain to untangle generations of characters whose names echo and multiply across decades, don’t exhaust yourself distinguishing between José Arcadios and Aurelianos. These barriers exist for a reason. They are not defects in the book; they are messages from your unready self. They whisper: Not yet. Not now. I was in high school when I first...
My first encounter with Russian literature was Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I powered through it in a fog, frantically copying down long passages and dialogues, still not quite getting it. The story follows a Russian university student who murders a pawnbroker landlady and her innocent sister, all because of his “louse theory”—the idea that extraordinary people can sacrifice a few insignificant “lice” to achieve their grand ideals. Even after killing two people and being sent to Siberia, the protagonist feels no remorse. To him, a couple of deaths mean nothing in service of his vision. Only when Sonya loves him does he find redemption. Her heart contains an infinite wellspring of life that awakens something in him. She helps him...
The night lay heavy and thick, without a trace of starlight. An old man reclined in his armchair, his snow-white hair like a brilliant lamp burning against the darkness. He struggled for breath, his body suffused with an indescribable pain. Death was drawing near, yet he felt no fear, for he could sense something burning hot beside him—that something was love. This old man was Jean Valjean, a “villain” who did good, a convict whose body housed a soul overflowing with compassion. Kind and generous, willing to destroy himself rather than harm his enemy, he saved those who had struck him down. Kneeling at the lofty altar of virtue, he transcended the mundane world and drew close to the angels....
After Reading
North Ward
