A NEW IMPRESSION OF REALITY

May 23rd, 2023 | San Francisco, CA

“This then, is the great illusion which Tolstoy sets himself to expose: that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events. Those who believe this turn out to be dreadfully mistaken. And side by side with these public faces- these hollow men, half-deluded, half aware of being fraudulent, talking, writing desperately and aimlessly in order to keep up appearances and avoid the bleak truths- side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence and irrelevance and blindness lies the real world, the stream of life which men understand, the attending to ordinary details of daily existence.”

- Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and The Fox. Pg. 21

“Utterly unlike her as he is in almost every other respect, Tolstoy is, perhaps the first to

propound the celebrated accusation which Virginia Woolf half a century later leveled against the public prophets of her own generation- Shaw and Wells and Arnold Bennett- as blind materialists who did not begin to understand what it is life consists of, who mistook its outer accidents, the unimportant aspects which lie outside the individual soul- the so called social, economic, political realities- for that which alone is genuine, the individual experience, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the colours, the smells, tastes, sounds and movements, the jealousies, loves, hatreds, the transforming moments, the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which all there is- which are reality.”

-Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and The Fox

These are quotes from my reading of Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and The Fox that leave with me, a new impression of reality.