Why should someone else’s success — or even their happiness — feel like a personal assault? When we see the successful person finally fail, why does some tiny part of us think: Good. Comeuppance. You will see it if you look, at least for a flash, a millisecond, it does feel like an attack. The richest man isn’t always the happiest anyway. We already knew that as children. So what did we forget?

Remember those perfect moments when we were together as children, before we knew that the saints weren’t really saints, when we were all responsible for each other and we were all in love with each other, before we became ambitious and angry and cynical, before we became jealous and frightened and competitive; those moments were the embers that never died. No matter how cold and wet we became, the embers glowed in our hearts. Schadenfreude is impossible in that glow. 

I read The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky as part of a four year mission to read 98 books from St. John’s College reading list. There is so many thoughts that have resonated in my head after finishing. Those are just some that rattled out.