Tag: wisdom?

  • A tooth abcsess, or that really high fever I had when I was four

    A tooth abcsess, or that really high fever I had when I was four

    In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera describes a Czech word which he claims is untranslatable. (And you know, he’s probably right.) The word is litost, meaning in broad strokes “a state of torment upon by the realization of one’s inadequacy or misery” (Kundera). Although I’m not the biggest Kundera fan*,…