In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author was moving into the small town on the south coast of England that had always been her home. Having longed to be a writer since childhood, she seized the chance…
“I love her happiness more than my own.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) was twenty-seven when he was arrested for belonging to a literary society deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime and sentenced to death. His sentence was repealed at the last moment, prompting him to pen an ecstatic letter about the meaning…
“Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars.” It is our biological wiring to exist — and then not; it is our psychological wiring to spend our lives running from this elemental fact on the hamster wheel of busyness and the hedonic treadmill of achievement, running from the disquieting knowledge that…
