As an teenager I came across an excerpt from
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. (I think.)

I wrote it down and read it so often that I think I have it memorized. It goes like this:

"Oh, if only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from us. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who can destroy a piece of his own heart?"

It was years ago that I did in fact read The Gulag Archipelago I and II but I never did come across that quote. Maybe it was the translation?


I'm going to have to read them again, slower, aren't I?

Help me out, Brainiacs!

My favorite memory from reading them. (And I'm concentrating like the Dickens on them while I'm reading them: they weren't an easy read then and my brain is softer now.) This very sweet girl looks at the title and says, "Is that in English?"

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I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda!--Bart Simpson
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I've been trying for years to remember where Thoreau wrote something similar. He said, "I have a certain sympathy with war: It so apes the gait and bearing of the soul."

So, WB, neither you nor I can remember precisely where we read our somewhat similar thoughts. Maybe that is symbolic of the very malady both writers were expressing: We cannot identify just where evil resides, but we know that it is there within us all. Perhaps we all need to re-read Lord of The Fliesand/or The Heart of Darkness.

It is a wonderful quote, WinterBranch....quite thought-provoking especially in today's world.

Jerry, what a great sleuth you are!

Thanks Jerry! So I did remember it correctly. Yay!

Quoth Asa:

quote:

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Perhaps we all need to re-read Lord of The Fliesand/or The Heart of Darkness.

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How odd. Just today I was trying to think of what the list of my ten favorite books would be and I thought about Lord of the Flies for the first time in ages!

(A quick glimpse into the American educational system.) Lord of the Flies is assigned to us to read. We get a worksheet of questions to answer. Of course, these questions are listed the order in which they're answered in the book. If you get to question two before you've found what you think is the answer to question one, you know to backtrack. The first question was something like, "Why did Golding choose to write about British schoolboys rather than some other nationality?" You think, "Ummm, dunno. Let's try question number two."

Question number two is answered in the second sentence of the book or something like that. There's a little "Note about the Author" before the novel starts, and it states that Golding was born in the UK in blahdeblahdy year. "Aha," we all think, and answer, "Because he was British."

Every single person gets it wrong. The correct answer was, according to our teacher, "to contrast the well-known stuffiness of British schoolboys to their descent into savagery."

I am not making that up. If I'd been less of a coward in those days, I would've raised my hand and said, "Ma'am? The next time we're supposed to have sterotypical knowledge/opinions about a group of people? Could we get a handout before we read the book?"

Honestly, you should've seen the looks on our faces. We were looking around at each other, as if to say, "I didn't even know I was supposed to HAVE an opinion of British schoolboys! I've never even thought about British schoolboys before!"

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I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda!--Bart Simpson
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As an ex-British schoolboy may I say that we were all sorts of monstrous things but stuffy? Not in any school that I attended, that's for sure!

Richard English