Musée des Beaux-Arts About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its c

#Tolstoy is hot right now, in part because we have the time to read his ten-gallon books; and also because his later non-fictional books laid out a blueprint for social justice that seems increasingly apt. Trying his best to strip #Christian #scripture (as Jefferson did) of its institutional accretions, Tolstoy arrived at a Christ of primitive pacifism; a dissolution of caste divisions, a disgust with institutional religion, indeed a call for the end of most institutions. May