Today is the birthday of Henry Sienkiewicz, author of Quo Vadis?. Kirjasto calls him a “Polish novelist, a storyteller, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905.” Also, “His strongly Catholic worldview deeply marked his writing.” One of my students is assigned to read Quo Vadis? this month; I think I’ll try to re-read it myself and see how I like it. I read it long, long ago but don’t remember it too well.
It’s also the birthday of Soren Kierkegaard who, as far as I can tell, was a mess–but interesting.
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
Soren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855), “The Sickness Unto Death”
Another quote: Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.
One thought on “Sienkiewicz and Kierkegaard”
Kierkegaard–while he needed to lighten up–was a brilliant Christian writer as well. His idea of “the leap of faith” –that our belief in is not based completely in rationality but on a conscious decision to trust God and of God’s purposes for life have been a great help to me.
I’ll have to send a link to your blog to some friends who home school–they just had their sixth baby. I’m not sure they’ll make it to eight but maybe you’ll inspire them. (We stopped at three)
Kierkegaard–while he needed to lighten up–was a brilliant Christian writer as well. His idea of “the leap of faith” –that our belief in is not based completely in rationality but on a conscious decision to trust God and of God’s purposes for life have been a great help to me.
I’ll have to send a link to your blog to some friends who home school–they just had their sixth baby. I’m not sure they’ll make it to eight but maybe you’ll inspire them. (We stopped at three)