moving around

I'm going to try to post something here, however brief, each week, so that it's worth your while checking back.

On Sunday at church there was a spontaneous reunion of people I was at college with, one of whom has got married and moved to Madagascar, one of whom has got married and moved to China, and two of whom have married each other and returned to Cambridge. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident writer, has died. One of the quotations from him that strikes me most is the following, describing his thoughts in the gulag:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates through the years. If only it were all so simple, if only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it was necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. Yet even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains an unuprooted small corner of evil. And who wants to destroy a piece of his own heart?

(The Gulag Archipelago)

A Russian proverb he quoted in his acceptance speech for the 1970 Nobel Prize for literature says "One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world."

Oh, and I think I've found somewhere to live for the coming academic year.