"But why is it you do nothing now?"
"I am doing . . ." Raskolnikov began sullenly and reluctantly.
"What are you doing?"
"Work . . ."
"What sort of work?"
"I am thinking," he answered seriously after a pause.
Nastasya was overcome with a fit of laughter. She was given to laughter and when anything amused her, she laughed inaudibly, quivering and shaking all over till she felt ill.
"And have you made much money by your thinking?" she managed to articulate at last.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Thinking Doesn't Pay
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, Part I, Chapter III (tr. Constance Garnett):