#like all the literature names the condition as incompatible with life but it stops at

[chiefofboatwatsonstittymug]

They donated Natalie's brain to science because she (to the surprise of nobody who knew her) had a completely unique brain nobody had ever seen before and it's gonna be used to train neurologists at I think UCL and is it weird that I wanna like email them and see if I can go and look at my dead friend's brain?

[owenthomasfiction]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to LEO TOLSTOY from Owen Thomas Fiction

Birthday wishes go out to Leo Tolstoy, born this day, September 9, in 1828. A true giant among writers, Tolstoy is credited by many as the father of the fictional historical narrative and “realist fiction” in which the characters and the plot are created around actual historical figures and events. As a writer, Tolstoy has inspired countless others, from James Joyce to Virginia Woolf to Marcel Proust to Ernest Hemingway to William Faulkner to generations of formidable Russian writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Anton Chekov. Even his highly competitive contemporaries like Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Nobokov praised Tolstoy’s work as flawless. The ripples from Tolstoy’s drop in the literary pond have reached every shore.

As a person, Tolstoy’s iconoclasm was legendary. A well-born nobleman, he nevertheless proudly considered himself a Christian-anarchist-pacifist, someone who believed the state to be the ultimate source of all violence and war and for whom moral existence required living according to religious principles beyond any governmental authority. And yet, Tolstoy found himself no more amenable to the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church than he was to Tsarist government. Bristling against the religious power structure, Tolstoy fought his way to an excommunication that ultimately pointed him toward the life of a wandering, impecunious aesthetic, a man beyond social, religious and governmental authority of any kind. Not that he was hopelessly without means; Leo Tolstoy made a great deal of money from his writing. He simply chose to give most of it away to beggars and the truly destitute. While it is a mistake to overlook Tolstoy’s personal failings, for there were many, it is worth noting that Gandhi and Martin Luther King each credited Leo Tolstoy’s example within their mix of influences.

For as long as there has been literature to read, there have been people (readers, publishers and scholars) ambitiously compiling lists of books that can fairly be including among “the best literature ever.” Even if any single such list might be rightly ignored as simply a matter of opinion (one person’s masterpiece might easily and justifiably be another person’s literary waste of time), agreement between different lists starts to get interesting and meaningful. If we were to compare all of the innumerable ‘best fiction ever’ lists prepared over the past one-hundred years, we would find that Leo Tolstoy’s name appears on virtually all of them at least twice; once for “War & Peace”and once for “Anna Karenina.”No, I have not conducted such a study. Who has the time? I am nevertheless confident in a broad consensus that these are two of the greatest novels ever written in the entire history of literature. Indeed, as a modest nod in the direction of that hypothesis, ‘The Greatest Books’organization conducted a study that compiled 116 ‘best books’ lists from a variety of sources and ranked all of the books on those lists by the number of times the books were mentioned. In a list of more than two thousand books,“War & Peace”ranked 7thon the list. “Anna Karenina”ranked 24th.  Only three authors can claim more than one book in the top 24 slots: Homer (“The Odyssey”and “The Iliad”), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (“The Brothers Karamazov”and “Crime and Punishment”) and Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy also wrote plays and dozens of works of short fiction, the most celebrated of which is probably “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”(which, incidentally, is ranked no. 427).

There is much to be noted about Tolstoy’s hedonism and his many children and his influential, long-suffering, devoted wife, Sofya, who is said to have transcribed the entirely of “War & Peace,” by hand, no fewer than eight times. Alas, those points of interest will not be explored here. Indeed, there is far more to know about Count Lyov Nikolayevich Tolstoy than is possible to even scratch the surface in this brief blog post. For those interested in going deep, I recommend Rosamund Bartlett’s biography entitled “Tolstoy: A Russian Life” (you can find the link here: https://amzn.to/2Q122Pw). In the end, if we really want a window into the soul of any writer, then we must read something of what the writer has written. If you have not read “War & Peace” or “Anna Karenina,” it is not too late. Daunting, yes, I know. But so is just about anything of lasting value. In the meantime, 190 years after his birth, here are a few things that Leo Tolstoy – that immensely complicated, imperfect, bizarre, and gifted writer – has written so that we might know him just a little better:

·     “Everything I know, I know because of love.”

·     “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.”

·     “God is the infinite ALL. Man is only a finite manifestation of him.”

·     “If you want to be happy, be.”

·     “All men love live not by what they may intend for their own well-being, but by the love that dwells in others.”

·     “We lost because we told ourselves we lost.”

·     “I think… that if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”

·     “If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”

·     “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

·      "The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom."

·      "Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us."

·      "It is true, I deny the incomprehensible Trinity, and the fable regarding the fall of man, which is absurd in our day. It is true, I deny the sacrilegious story of a God born of a virgin to redeem the race."

·      "Music is the shorthand of emotion."

·      "The religious superstition is encouraged by means of the institution of churches, processions, monuments, festivities....The so-called clergy stupefy the masses....They befog the people and keep them in an eternal condition of stupefaction."

·      "In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you."

·      "Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them"

·      "Don't seek God in temples. He is close to you. He is within you. Only you should surrender to Him and you will rise above happiness and unhappiness."

·      "It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice"

·      "A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul."

·      "If one loves, one loves the whole person as he or she is, and not as one might wish them to be."

·      "It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty."

·      "War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves."

·      "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

·      "It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness."

·      "Conceit is incompatible with understanding."

·      "Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal."

"I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means -- except by getting off his back."