Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there's no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you're going to get out.

But nothing is all black in nature.

First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.

One drop of truth can outweigh an ocean of lies

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

A meek fellow ... is a real godsend in any gang.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.