The Necklace

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  “SHE WAS one of those pretty, charming young ladies, born, as if through an error of destiny, into a family of clerks. She had no dowry, no hopes, no means of becoming known, appreciated, loved, and married by a man either rich or distinguished; and she allowed herself to marry a petty clerk in the office of the Board of Education. . . .  She had neither frocks nor jewels, nothing. And she loved only those things. She felt that she was made for them. She had such a desire to please, to be sought after, to be clever, and courted.” —THE NECKLACE Guy de Maupassant    France, 1884 (pic by Grok) Read this short story here:  https://americanliterature.com/author/guy-de-maupassant/short-story/the-necklace

For Daily Reading, Next Year

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Leo Tolstoy had an idea: collect wisdom from “the best and wisest people” such as Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, Socrates, Matthew Arnold, The New Testament, and others, and compile into a single book for short, daily “devotional” reading. Peter Sekirin writes, “This was Leo Tolstoy’s last major work. . . . preparing three revised editions between 1904 and 1910. It was his own favorite everyday reading, a book he would turn to regularly for the rest of his life.” Tolstoy arranged the collected wisdom of the ages with some of his own writing by topic.  His book was banned by Russia from 1912 until 1995, when it was republished . . . In Russian. The first English translation was made in 1996. I’ll be supplementing my daily reading this next year with Tolstoy’s “Daily Calendar of Wisdom.”

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