I am a few pages away from finishing Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. I am enjoying every moment of it, and I hope to write a review of it when I am finished. In the meantime, I have an amazing quote to share with you all. One of the characters, Lebedev, has been telling a group of people about his interpretation of the Apocalypse. He believes that the star called Wormwood represents the railway system that covers all of Europe.

“But, once again, it’s not to the point. Our question is whether the ‘water of life’ has been weakened by the increase of–”

“Railroads?” cried Kolya.

“Not railway communication, my young but impetuous lad, but the whole tendency of which the railroads may serve as, so to speak, the artistic representation. They speed around, clanking and rattling, all for the happiness, they say, of humanity! A certain thinker, secluded from the world, complained, 'Mankind has grown too noisy and industrial, there is little spiritual peace.’ And another thinker, always on the go, replied triumphantly to him, 'That may be, but the rumble of railroad cars bringing bread to starving humanity is better, perhaps, than spiritual peace,’ and walked proudly away from him. But I, the abominable Lebedev, do not believe in cars that bring bread to humanity! For the cars that bring bread to humanity without a moral basis for doing so may be coldly excluding a considerable part of humanity from the enjoyment of what is brought, as has happened already.”