Hacker News Books

I just finished reading “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles, and it gives good (though likely biased) context after the Bolshevik Revolution, that made reading this article more thought provoking than I think it would be.

Though even if you hate Biden, he isn’t Stalin, just as Trump wasn’t Hitler.
The media is absurd to me though. Seriously they lack any sort of principle it seems. Whatever “The Party” is doing is right. (For Fox News the party being Republican, and democrat for all else)

It's strange how prose and poetry can change our lives, reconfigure our ideas about life and death. I remember this quote from a book I read two years ago like it was yesterday. Somehow beautiful writing has a life of its own.

“From the earliest age, we must learn to say good-bye to friends and family. We see our parents and siblings off at the station; we visit cousins, attend schools, join the regiment; we marry, or travel abroad. It is part of the human experience that we are constantly gripping a good fellow by the shoulders and wishing him well, taking comfort from the notion that we will hear word of him soon enough. But experience is less likely to teach us how to bid our dearest possessions adieu. And if it were to? We wouldn’t welcome the education. For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity—all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, is the very one in which we hid as a boy; and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table on Christmas Eve; and it was with this handkerchief that she once dried her tears, et cetera, et cetera. Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion...” ― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow