Tuesday, September 18, 2007

You may notice...

...especially now that I'm dragging your attention to it, that I have added a small quotation next to every combox link:

«Мир спасёт красота.»

It means, "Beauty shall save the world," and is pronounced "Mir spahsoyt krasota."

This is a famous line credited to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, uttered by Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, and given its greatest notoriety when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's discussed it in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. It is a quotation certainly made more attractive to me when I read it in a bilingual edition of that speech, for I love Russian simply as a thing of beauty and, thus, love this aphorism as a concentrated word of truth, a three-word hymn, in an age that confuses fitness with beauty, or perhaps, beauty with apathy. Hence, it shall be a small anchor for each post at FCA. It is, by the way, the only thing I've ever considered getting tattooed onto myself.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It sounds like you are keeping up with your languages; I wonder what conversations we might have had, and in which languages, if I'd been able to stay in Taiwan.

However, as I am teaching a middle school Latin class this year, I am learning some things that were previously of your realm alone! Have at you! :)