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Tom Barson's avatar

I'll add to your list of complete, yet-truncated, artistic trajectories. 'The Brothers Karamazov' -- one of the great apexes of the nineteenth century novel -- was to be a two-volume work, in whose second volume the "failed" monk Alyosha was to find his vocation as a revolutionary. It's a metamorphosis that would have struck Dostoevsky's Russian readers as completely logical, but might in retrospect have come to seem utterly banal. Lenin put paid, surely, to the world's guileless Alyoshas as agents of change.

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STUART SCADRON-WATTLES's avatar

There are some who will conclude that you are arguing that all suffering has meaning and purpose. I am not among them. But the transformation of suffering into purpose and meaning is a spiritual alchemy of which homo sapiens is uniquely capable. And in these dark days, we must reaffirm that human capability, through compassionate witness and action.

With gratefulness for your own witness.

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