It's not really Science Fiction, but it's been mentioned lately.
The parts pertaining to peaceful romance appeal to me much more than
--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. Walk humbly with thy God. tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' Make 1984 fiction again.
It's not really Science Fiction, but it's been mentioned lately.
The parts pertaining to peaceful romance appeal to me much more than
the warfare. Ironically, Tolstoy's tome helps me cope with armed
conflict.
Tolstoy's the tonic to sort out the scat show called war. His Rus
realist savoir-faire offers welcome relief from the relentlessly riven
mass mind's culture of chaotic current events:
A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing
and does not want to know anything, since he does not
believe that anything can be known.
As an aside, did the Tiffany Network plagiarize Tolstoy in its
previously popular prisoner of war TV show?
An interesting Tolstoy translation tic: the absent antecedent,
also missing elsewhere, when Russian is translated into English. For instance, the antecedent's apparently an apparition when the pronoun
"ours" appears in this translated excerpt:
"We must let him see Amelie, she's exquisite!" said
one of "ours," kissing his finger tips.
Tolstoy masterfully shares his characters' inner life. This technique
reveals characters as all too human; enthralled to human virtue and
vice.
The reader receives omniscience; a granular view of humanity's
triumphs and travails, without a protagonist to lead the reader around
by the nose.
When Russian soldier Andrey Grigoriev killed Ukrainian soldier
Dmytro Maslovsky in hand-to-hand combat, the latter reportedly said:
"Let me say goodbye to the sky." A similar situation occurs in WAR AND
PEACE:
"What's this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way," thought
he, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see
how the struggle of the Frenchmen with the gunners ended,
whether the red-haired gunner had been killed or not and
whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he saw
nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the sky-the
lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with gray
clouds gliding slowly across it. "How quiet, peaceful, and
solemn; not at all as I ran," thought Prince Andrew-"not as
we ran, shouting and fighting, not at all as the gunner and
the Frenchman with frightened and angry faces struggled for
the mop: how differently do those clouds glide across that
lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky
before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes!
All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky.
There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not
exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!..."
Some see events as tightly controlled by powerful Great Men: Cameron,
May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, Obama, Trump, Biden, Putin, and Zelensky. Tolstoy views Great Men as powerless:
The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the
event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the
actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by
lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in
order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the
event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the
concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without
any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was
necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real
power-the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and
guns-should consent to carry out the will of these weak
individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an
infinite number of diverse and complex causes. ...
In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving
names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest
connection with the event itself.
Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their
own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is
related to the whole course of history and predestined
from eternity. ...
The luring of Napoleon into the depths of the country was
not the result of any plan, for no one believed it to be
possible; it resulted from a most complex interplay of
intrigues, aims, and wishes among those who took part in
the war and had no perception whatever of the inevitable,
or of the one way of saving Russia. Everything came about
fortuitously.
A few football fans fantasize about war being merely another football
game. Tolstoy thinks the consequences are greater:
An army gains a victory, and at once the rights of the
conquering nation have increased to the detriment of the
defeated. An army has suffered defeat, and at once a people
loses its rights in proportion to the severity of the reverse,
and if its army suffers a complete defeat the nation is quite
subjugated.
Witness how enlightened Globalism spontaneously sparked a woke wake
pyre.
The Russian Orthodox Church (a close cousin to the Catholic Church)
plays a prominent enough role in the novel for Napoleon to remark, "That Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy Moscow!"
The Mandylion flag, emblazened with IC XC NIKA, is reportedly the
most popular battle flag in the militias of the Donetsk and Luhansk
People's Republics. In the end, only God Almighty determines the outcome
of war.
For people who love long stories - WAR AND PEACE is a very long
story. Tolstoy made a realist out of me and his novel is recommended.
It's not really Science Fiction, but it's been mentioned lately.
The parts pertaining to peaceful romance appeal to me much more than
the warfare. Ironically, Tolstoy's tome helps me cope with armed
Thank you for those fascinatingly interesting observations and recommendation.
(It is four or five years since I obtained a copy but the length has
usually influenced shorter novels to be chosen to read first as I do not
like to be reading more than one book at a time.)
On Thu, 30 Jan 2025, Don wrote:
It's not really Science Fiction, but it's been mentioned lately.
The parts pertaining to peaceful romance appeal to me much more than
the warfare. Ironically, Tolstoy's tome helps me cope with armed
Too long and boring for me. I prefer Dostoyesky any day of the week. Crime and >punishment is excellent! Borther Karamazov also good. The idiot I found so-so.
D wrote:
Don wrote:
It's not really Science Fiction, but it's been mentioned lately.
The parts pertaining to peaceful romance appeal to me much more than
the warfare. Ironically, Tolstoy's tome helps me cope with armed
Too long and boring for me. I prefer Dostoyesky any day of the week. Crime and
punishment is excellent! Borther Karamazov also good. The idiot I found so-so.
I enjoy Bondarchuck's /War and Peace/ every time I see it. I just wish
it were complete. The novel was not memorable.
/The Idiot/ was interesting, but ultimately pointless. If an actual
idiot had been involved, that might have helped.
I've experienced /Crime and Punishment/ both in novel and Classics Illustrated form. Somewhere, probably in a class, I was fed the
factoid that the protagonist turns himself in because the detective
wears him down. Imagine my surprise when I last read it to realize the
true reason.
/The Brothers Karamazov/ was read as part of the collection called The
Great Books of the Western World. I didn't much like it. Perhaps if he
had finished the projected follow-ups it would have made more sense.
The /only/ character I had any concern about (any empathy with) was a
small boy who dies. None of the brothers was worth reading about,
IMHO.
I also read other Dostoyevsky novels, notably /The Devils/ which, like
/The Secret Agent/ (which Hitchcock filmed under the title /Saboteur/,
having used /The Secret Agent/ for a completely different spy story
earlier), is about The Revolution. One thing I noticed in a few of
them were references to Jesuits trying to convert Orthodox believers
to Roman Catholicism. This makes me wonder if the famous
"anti-Christian" essay in /The Brothers Karamazov/ is not actually an "anti-Roman-Catholicism" essay, since it is clearly about a Roman
Catholic institution. But I have no idea if this is the case or not.
Don wrote:
As an aside, after being banned, Freemasonry is reportedly making a
comeback in Syria.
The PDF that's been floating around is regarded by actual Freemasons
with a great deal of suspicion. It does not have any information
establishing the legitimacy of the group that published it.
It may well be a honeytrap to make Masons in Syria reveal themselves.
There's an existing District Grand Lodge of Syria-Lebanon (in exile)
in New York, with continuity back to the pre-Ba'athist days. That
would be the proper body to re-institute Masonry in Syria.
Too long and boring for me. I prefer Dostoyesky any day of the week. Crime and
punishment is excellent! Borther Karamazov also good. The idiot I found so-so.
I enjoy Bondarchuck's /War and Peace/ every time I see it. I just wish
it were complete. The novel was not memorable.
/The Idiot/ was interesting, but ultimately pointless. If an actual
idiot had been involved, that might have helped.
I've experienced /Crime and Punishment/ both in novel and Classics Illustrated form. Somewhere, probably in a class, I was fed the
factoid that the protagonist turns himself in because the detective
wears him down. Imagine my surprise when I last read it to realize the
true reason.
/The Brothers Karamazov/ was read as part of the collection called The
Great Books of the Western World. I didn't much like it. Perhaps if he
had finished the projected follow-ups it would have made more sense.
The /only/ character I had any concern about (any empathy with) was a
small boy who dies. None of the brothers was worth reading about,
IMHO.
I also read other Dostoyevsky novels, notably /The Devils/ which, like
/The Secret Agent/ (which Hitchcock filmed under the title /Saboteur/,
having used /The Secret Agent/ for a completely different spy story
earlier), is about The Revolution. One thing I noticed in a few of
them were references to Jesuits trying to convert Orthodox believers
to Roman Catholicism. This makes me wonder if the famous
"anti-Christian" essay in /The Brothers Karamazov/ is not actually an "anti-Roman-Catholicism" essay, since it is clearly about a Roman
Catholic institution. But I have no idea if this is the case or not.
Cryptoengineer wrote:
Don wrote:
<snip>
As an aside, after being banned, Freemasonry is reportedly making a
comeback in Syria.
The PDF that's been floating around is regarded by actual Freemasons
with a great deal of suspicion. It does not have any information
establishing the legitimacy of the group that published it.
It may well be a honeytrap to make Masons in Syria reveal themselves.
There's an existing District Grand Lodge of Syria-Lebanon (in exile)
in New York, with continuity back to the pre-Ba'athist days. That
would be the proper body to re-institute Masonry in Syria.
Thank you for the intel.
Mao Zedong supposedly staged a similar stunt with his Hundred
Flowers Campaign. Or maybe it was merely miscommunication between
Zedong and his handsome, celebrity cover boy, populist Zhou Enlai. Gluttonously greedy crony Capitalism may meet its match if China
opens the page to a new chapter ON PROTRACTED WAR.
Regardless, you entered my mind when talking to two Catholic
physicians at a Christmas party: one old and one young. The young
Doc said he joined the Freemasons at early in his career. He was
subsequently trolled as to whether he knew all of the secrets now?
"Everything's been published and is available to the public."
he answered, with a laugh. It seemed polite for me to simply move
on to another topic instead of playing the pedant who already knew
the material from my reading project last year.
So, there you have it - a Catholic Freemason in ignorant bliss.
Danke,
--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. Walk humbly with thy God. tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' Make 1984 fiction again.
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