Classic Literature Dump

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📜 On This Day—Classic Literature Dump August 30, 1797—The Birth of Mary ShelleySomers Town, LondonOut of grief, genius. ...
30/08/2025

📜 On This Day—Classic Literature Dump

August 30, 1797—The Birth of Mary Shelley
Somers Town, London

Out of grief, genius. Out of a storm, a monster. On this day, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born, the daughter of radical thinkers, destined to outlive them and to haunt the world with a tale that would never die.

At just eighteen, she dreamed up Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus during a fateful night of ghost stories by Lake Geneva. In that dream, she gave the modern world its most enduring myth: a scientist blinded by ambition, and a creature more human than the man who made him.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was more than horror; it was philosophy disguised as terror, science wrapped in sorrow. It asked whether progress redeems us or damns us, whether man is God or only another flawed creation.

Her life was shadowed by tragedy, the deaths of her children, the drowning of Percy Bysshe Shelley, yet she carried her grief into her prose, writing novels, editing her husband’s works, and shaping Romanticism into something darker, sharper, unforgettable.

On this day, we remember not just the “mother of science fiction,” but a woman who stitched philosophy, poetry, and pain into a single immortal myth.

Suggested Reflections

Revisit Frankenstein https://amzn.to/4n8rjX0 not as horror but as political philosophy: who bears the blame, creator or creation?

Reflect on how personal tragedy sharpened Shelley’s insight into human loneliness and ambition.

Consider whether every modern debate on AI, cloning, and technology is simply Mary Shelley’s ghost speaking again.

“Gentleness is not weakness. It is the most daring force, because it resists violence without becoming its mirror.”~ Ann...
30/08/2025

“Gentleness is not weakness. It is the most daring force, because it resists violence without becoming its mirror.”
~ Anne Dufourmantelle

We often mistake gentleness for fragility, as though only the strong may raise their voices and the meek must retreat into silence. But Dufourmantelle reminds us that gentleness is not the absence of strength—it is strength disciplined, strength held back from domination.

Book : Power Of Gentleness https://amzn.to/3HP5L2E

📜 Classic Literature Dump They say a man will die young if he takes two wives. Yet my friend died at twenty-eight, untou...
29/08/2025

📜 Classic Literature Dump

They say a man will die young if he takes two wives. Yet my friend died at twenty-eight, untouched by marriage.
They say smokers are liable to die young. Yet countless children, innocent of smoke, lie buried because of war.

The truth is plain, there is no manual to life. No proverb, no superstition, no law of averages can shield us from the randomness of existence. The human story is not written in certainties but in fragile breaths and unforeseen turns.

What, then, remains? To live fully, not as though life is guaranteed, but as though it is already slipping through our fingers. To savor each moment, not because it is secure, but precisely because it is fleeting.

As Marcus Aurelius once wrote: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

Life is not about predicting the end,it is about refusing to waste the middle.

Suggested Reading: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy https://amzn.to/45XxIgD [ad] , a haunting meditation on mortality, meaning, and the urgency of truly living.

Painting: ‘Still Life' An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life by Harmen Steenwijck (c. 1640)

Beneath a bridge, someone turned bare concrete into a home—sketched television, window, and birdcage on a wall. A mattre...
28/08/2025

Beneath a bridge, someone turned bare concrete into a home—sketched television, window, and birdcage on a wall. A mattress laid on the floor completes the picture. This is not luxury. This is not comfort. And yet, it is art.

The hand behind it chose not to surrender to the cold anonymity of the street. Instead, he framed his own world, finding beauty where society sees only abandonment. It is the stubborn act of a soul refusing to be erased.

One is reminded of Dostoevsky’s words: “Man is what he believes.” In this drawing, belief becomes survival; imagination becomes resistance.What does it say about us,that some must draw their homes on walls while others pass by without seeing?

Suggested Reading: Les Misérables by Victor Hugo https://amzn.to/41UPShG [ad] a book that reminds us how dignity persists even when society denies it.

"The universe is not outside you. Look inside yourself ; everything that you want, you already are. "~Rumi
28/08/2025

"The universe is not outside you. Look inside yourself ; everything that you want, you already are. "
~Rumi

The Worth of Livingby Fulton SheenFirst published: 1946Life, Fulton Sheen insists, is not to be measured in riches, appl...
28/08/2025

The Worth of Living
by Fulton Sheen
First published: 1946

Life, Fulton Sheen insists, is not to be measured in riches, applause, or the noise of ambition. Its worth is hidden in sacrifice, in endurance, in the quiet gift of love given without demand.

To live, in Sheen’s vision, is not to escape suffering but to transfigure it. Pain becomes not a curse, but a currency—an offering that redeems the ordinary with meaning. Happiness is not found in the carnival of pleasures, but in the steady embrace of one’s cross.

Georges de La Tour’s Magdalene at a Mirror holds the same truth. A solitary figure, illuminated by one fragile candle, sits in stillness with her reflection and mortality. No grandeur, no spectacle,only the hushed confrontation of a soul with itself.

Between Sheen’s words and La Tour’s painting, a singular message emerges:
That the worth of living lies not in how brightly one burns in the world’s eyes, but in how steadfastly one keeps the flame alive in the silence of the heart.

A book and an image that remind us that life’s deepest measure is not survival, but surrender.

Book: The Worth of living https://amzn.to/45Tj8H3 [ad]

Painting 'Magdalene at a Mirror',Georges de La Tour (c. 1635–1640)

📜Letters from the DeadImagination does not stay buried.Name: Edith Nesbit (E. Nesbit)Date of Birth: August 15, 1858Date ...
26/08/2025

📜Letters from the Dead
Imagination does not stay buried.
Name: Edith Nesbit (E. Nesbit)
Date of Birth: August 15, 1858
Date of Death: May 4, 1924
Letter recovered: August 15, 2025

To the children who grew up too soon,

I was Edith Nesbit, though the world remembers me best as E. Nesbit. They said I wrote for children, but truly, I wrote for the child still gasping within the weary breast of every adult. I gave you Five Children and It, The Railway Children, carpets that flew, coins that whispered wishes,but it was not only play. It was rebellion.

You see, I lived in a world that pressed women into silence and children into obedience. I, too, was expected to shrink. Yet through stories, I discovered a loophole. A tale is a rebellion disguised as a bedtime kiss.

Do I regret? Yes. I regret that so often I had to smuggle my truths under the cover of fantasy. That to be heard, I had to pretend it was only play. I regret the poverty that hounded me even as my books filled shelves, the shadows behind the laughter.

But I also confess: I still believe in magic. Not the kind of genies and phoenixes—but the kind that stirs when a child reads a book and for the first time understands the world could be otherwise. That is the truest enchantment, and it is stronger than death.

So I ask you: Do not forget the child you once were. Do not bury her in bills and bitterness. Keep her alive, for she is the one who still believes the world can be changed.

-E. Nesbit
The railway still runs, if you listen for it.
Book : The Railway Children https://amzn.to/4fZtauO [ad]

Did You Know?Franz Kafka, whose name gave birth to the adjective “Kafkaesque,” asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his...
26/08/2025

Did You Know?
Franz Kafka, whose name gave birth to the adjective “Kafkaesque,” asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his unpublished manuscripts after his death in 1924. Brod refused, preserving works like The Trial and The Castle–books that would later define modernist literature. Without that act of disobedience, much of Kafka’s genius would have vanished into ash.

Photo: Kafka and Max Brod pictured together, likely during an outdoor moment,perfect for capturing their literary friendship.

“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning....
26/08/2025

“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning.”
~ Franz Kafka

Kafka’s The Trial is not merely a novel; it is an allegory of existence in the modern world. Josef K. is arrested, accused, and condemned without ever knowing his crime. His struggle is not just with the faceless court but with the absurdity of life itself — a bureaucracy without reason, a system without justice, a fate without explanation.

What Kafka reveals is terrifying: that innocence offers no shield, and that truth is irrelevant when power operates behind invisible walls. To read The Trial is to confront the nightmare of being trapped in a world where meaning itself has been confiscated.

The haunting question it leaves us with is not whether Josef K. is guilty, but whether we too are caught in trials we cannot name–social, spiritual, or personal–condemned by rules we did not choose, living sentences we do not fully understand.

Kafka whispers that perhaps the true prison is not the courtroom, but the silence of those who stop asking why.

Book : 'The Trial' 1925 https://amzn.to/3UJ3hFV

Is It Fair to Bring Children Into This World?It’s a question more people quietly carry than we might think: Is it right ...
25/08/2025

Is It Fair to Bring Children Into This World?
It’s a question more people quietly carry than we might think: Is it right to bring a child into a world like this? With all its uncertainties, its cruelty, its instability—how can anyone make such a decision with a clear conscience?

For some, life itself feels too fragile to pass on. They see the suffering around them, the injustices that go unanswered, the constant sense that things are unraveling. To bring a child into that feels heavy, even reckless. The thought lingers: What if they suffer more than they’ll ever find joy?

But maybe it’s not about finding a perfect answer. Maybe it’s about holding both realities at once: yes, life is painful and uncertain—and yet, it still holds moments worth living for. It’s not about guaranteeing happiness for those we bring into the world, because none of us can promise that. It’s about asking: can I raise someone with tenderness, honesty, and the strength to navigate what life brings? Can I teach them not just to survive, but to find their own meaning in a world that doesn’t always make sense?

As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote:
“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist?”
For thinkers like Schopenhauer, life itself was suffering, and bringing a child into existence meant introducing them to that inevitable pain.
For others, like Albert Camus, life’s absurdity didn’t negate its worth. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he argued that even in a world without clear meaning, choosing to live and to create life could still be an act of quiet rebellion, a choice to say yes to existence itself.
Bringing a child into the world isn’t a moral certainty. It’s a choice made in full awareness that life will both hurt them and bless them. And perhaps that’s where the answer lies: not in waiting for a safer world, but in committing to be a presence that makes their world gentler from the start.

Do you think it’s possible to bring children into this world with good conscience? And what would that responsibility mean to you?
Art: 'Young Mother Sewing', 1900 by Mary Cassatt

OPENING QUESTIONIn 1984, Winston writes in his secret diary: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four....
25/08/2025

OPENING QUESTION

In 1984, Winston writes in his secret diary: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Do you believe truth still has power in a world where lies are repeated louder and longer?

“Nothing can dim the light that shines from within.”~ Maya AngelouThe world has always tried to silence voices it does n...
24/08/2025

“Nothing can dim the light that shines from within.”
~ Maya Angelou

The world has always tried to silence voices it does not understand. Empires have collapsed, tyrants have risen and fallen, yet what remains unbroken is the inner flame of those who refused to surrender their truth.

Angelou’s words remind us that light is not borrowed from approval, applause, or circumstance. It does not flicker because of envy, betrayal, or the storms of misfortune. True light is sovereign, born within, sustained within, and guarded by the strength of one’s own spirit.

History bears witness: Anne Frank writing in her hiding place, Dostoevsky penning brilliance after the shadow of prison, Maya Angelou herself rising above every attempt to break her. Their light endured because it was never granted by the world and therefore could not be taken away by it.

The question is not whether the world will try to dim you. It always will. The question is whether you will remember that the flame is yours to guard, yours to keep, and yours to let shine.

Book: “The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin (1963). https://amzn.to/3UIDcH2 [ad]

Painting :‘Goodbye Summer’ Eric Bowman, 2016.

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