In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was teh way of the world that Dostoevksy depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good.
What alternative is there to the media__ __s_ versus __hem_? The danger is that if it is used to prop up this __ighteous_ position of __urs_ all we will see from now on are ever more exacting and minute analyses of the __irty_ distortions in __heir_ thinking. Without some flexibility in our definitions we__l remain forever stuck with the same old knee-jerk reactions, or worse, slide into complete apathy.
Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
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What alternative is there to the media__ __s_ versus __hem_? The danger is that if it is used to prop up this __ighteous_ position of __urs_ all we will see from now on are ever more exacting and minute analyses of the __irty_ distortions in __heir_ thinking. Without some flexibility in our definitions we__l remain forever stuck with the same old knee-jerk reactions, or worse, slide into complete apathy.
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In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevksy depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good.
I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.
To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to escape from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.
Don't blame me. That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.
There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.