My Happy Place

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  “The floor was carpetless. The whitewashed walls were in parts scrawled over with strange diagrams, and in others covered with shelves crowded with philosophical instruments, the uses of many of which were unknown to me. On one side of the fireplace, stood a bookcase filled with dingy folios; on the other, a small organ, fantastically decorated with painted carvings of medieval saints and devils. Through the half-opened door of a cupboard at the further end of the room, I saw a long array of geological specimens, surgical preparations, crucibles, retorts, and jars of chemicals; while on the mantelshelf beside me, amid a number of small objects, stood a model of the solar system, a small galvanic battery, and a microscope. Every chair had its burden. Every corner was heaped high with books. The very floor was littered over with maps, casts, papers, tracings, and learned lumber of all conceivable kinds.” “The Phantom Coach” By Amelia Edwards (1831–1892)

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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