The Kiss

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  “Ryabovitch pulled the bed-clothes over his head, curled himself up in bed, and tried to gather together the floating images in his mind and to combine them into one whole. But nothing came of it. He soon fell asleep, and his last thought was that someone had caressed him and made him happy—that something extraordinary, foolish, but joyful and delightful, had come into his life. The thought did not leave him even in his sleep. When he woke up the sensations of oil on his neck and the chill of peppermint about his lips had gone, but joy flooded his heart just as the day before.” The Kiss By Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)

Impossible, You Say?

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Montaigne confronts unbelief, arrogance and ignorance head-on in his short essay, “That it is Folly to Measure Truth and Error by Our Own Capacity.” He begins explaining that belief is in direct proportion to the malleability of the soul. Establishing this, he proves that we can’t say this or that is impossible on the grounds that we don’t have enough information. We should say instead that this or that is unusual. 


Reason dictates that “to condemn anything for false and impossible, is arrogantly and impiously to circumscribe and limit the will of God, and the power of our mother nature, within the bounds of my own capacity.”  He adds that, “to condemn them as impossible, is by a temerarious presumption to pretend to know the utmost bounds of possibility.” Belief is kept intact by judging “with more reverence, and with greater acknowledgment of our own ignorance and infirmity . . . “


So the next time someone says “that’s impossible” see what happens by asking “don’t you mean ‘unusual’?”


For further study: Matthew 17:30, 19:26; Mark 10:27; Luke 1:30, 18:27

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