Tag Archives: Elif Batuman

An Antithesis

June 1, 2026 – 9:43 am

A text for this post is from Wendell Berry:

Justice is a rational procedure. Mercy is not a procedure and it is not rational. It is a kind of freedom that comes from sympathy, which is to say imagination – the felt knowledge of what it is to be another person or another creature. It is free because it does not have to be just. Justice is desirable, of course, but it is virtually the opposite of mercy. Mercy, says the Epistle of James, “rejoiceth against judgment.”

That is from an essay published originally in Citizenship Papers (2003); I am reading it in Essays 1993–2017 (Library of America, 2019). The quoted essay is called “Two Minds”: those minds are rational and sympathetic respectively. Although Berry does not use the term here, I would say that those two minds are in antithesis.

Seen from a beach, two fully clothed woman stand against the sea, holding up mobiles, one facing the sea obliquely, the other walking along the shore; in the sea, a woman and man stand together, in bikini and trunks respectively. Beyond them all, two breakwaters in line, parallel to the shore, made of rubble

I often read Berry at a beach that is in antithesis to Lesbos. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Nature, Pirsig | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

War and Talk

June 18, 2017 – 7:41 pm

This is a foray into the mystery of how things happen, based the 164th of the 361 chapters of War and Peace. This chapter contains, in a one-sentence paragraph, a summary of Tolstoy’s theory of history:

Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Aristotle, Causation, Collingwood, Criteriological Science, Harper’s, History, Istanbul, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Plato, Principles of Art | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (13)

The Private, Unskilled One

May 19, 2017 – 5:55 am

I went into Istanbul’s Pandora Bookshop a month ago, looking for an English translation of War and Peace, since the Garnett translation I had read at college was falling apart. I was told the Oxford World’s Classics edition (with the Maude translation) was coming the next week, and it did come.

Elif Batuman, The Idiot, in Nesin Matematik Köyü, Kayser Dağı Mevkii, Şirince, Selçuk, İzmir, Turkey, 2017.05.18

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Categorical Thinking, Education, Harper’s, Hitchens, Maugham, Nesin Mathematics Village, Thoreau | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (5)