Clippings

Some people … are furious when they miss a train, transported with rage if their dinner is badly cooked, sunk in despair if the chimney smokes, and vow vengeance against the whole industrial order when their clothes fail to return from the sanitary steam laundry. The energy that such people waste on trivial troubles would be sufficient, if more wisely directed, to make and unmake empires.

If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon. But Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I dare say, envied Hercules, who never existed.

Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it, the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.

Most people, when they are left free to fill their own time according to their own choice, are at a loss to think of anything sufficiently pleasant to be worth doing. And whatever they decide on, they are troubled by the feeling that something else would have been pleasanter. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

When walking into the main square El Zócalo, a first-time visitor to Mexico City in 1940… would have been surprised to notice that while all the buildings on the square were built on the square’s level, the theater stood at that time 6 ft. (1.8 m) below it so that one had to go down a staircase to enter. But upon inquiring of a Mexican friend about this unusual feature, the visitor would have learned that like the other Alameda buildings, the theater had been built on grade, on the loose sand permeated with the water of ancient Lake Texcoco, [and] the enormous weight of the palace had slowly squeezed the water out from under it, compressing the soil and lowering the theater in due time….

But if our visitor had returned to the Alameda in the 1960s, he would have noticed, to his greater surprise, that the National Theater had moved again. One still entered it by way of a staircase, but now one went up, because the theater was 6 ft. (1.8 m) above the level of the square, having risen, undamaged, 12 ft. (3.6 m)…. Yes, a number of tall buildings had been erected around the square since he had been there twenty years earlier. This time the weight of the skyscrapers had squeezed the water out from under their foundations and pushed it back under the theater.

The fabric of American social life owes a great deal to the formidable spatiotemporal isolation of the student milieu.

“… it was to avoid the disgrace of it that I wanted to drown myself, but then I thought, standing there over the water, that if I’ve considered myself strong up till now, then why should I be afraid now of disgrace?” he said, running ahead. “Was that pride, Dunya?”

“Yes, Rodya.”

A light seemed to gleam in his extinguished eyes; he seemed to be pleased at still being proud.

“You don’t think, do you, sister, that I was simply afraid of the water?” he asked, staring into her face with an ugly grin.