Joseph Brodsky

It's not fun while you're doing it, but you're glad you did it after.

So the great line about this statue from the Soviet dissident, Joseph Brodsky, he walked up here one early morning and he said, "If Marcus Aurelius is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins." I think he's just sort of marveling at this great man who, 2,000 years ago in the pages of his journal, he was writing notes to himself about controlling his temper, about getting up early, quenching his desires, his urges, about being kind to people, about working hard.

And he says, "Fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you." He didn't wanna be imperialized.

He didn't wanna be stained purple by all the accoutrement of power, the sycophants around him, people worshiping him as a god.

It reminded me of one of my favorite essays.

There was this essay by Joseph Brodsky about the Marcus Aurelius equestrian statue that, uh, I just adore.

So the great line about this statue from the Soviet dissident Joseph Brodsky, he walked up here one early morning.

It was quiet, not like this, right? It was quiet, not unlike this.

And he said, "If Marcus Aurelius is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins." I think he's just sort of marveling at this great man who 2,000 years ago in the pages of his journal, he was writing notes to himself about controlling his temper, about getting up early, about quenching his desires, his urges, about being kind to people, about working hard.

The consequences will be far-reaching.

After all, many of Russia's literary giants, Joseph Brodsky, Anna Akhmatova, and Ivan Bunin among them, never obtained a college degree.

Lawmakers have made no secret of the reason these standards exist.

Literature, they said, is a matter of state importance, central to the country's identity.

I didn't note down where.

And there's poetry by Nabokov and Brodsky, Joseph Brodsky, who later became a Nobel laureate.

As an aside, have you heard of Vivian Darkbloom? No, no means nothing to me.

Don't think so.

Or in which the boredom is simply baked into the cake of the meaningful experience.

I always think of this, I write about this speech that the, the poet Joseph Brodsky gave at Dartmouth College to these graduating seniors, in which he said, "You're gonna go out into the world, and you're gonna be so bored." This is in the '80s.

"And you're going to do what people have always done to escape boredom.

You're going to have affairs and take drugs and try to crowd your life with different things.