Literaturespeaking topic
Dostoevsky's Underground Man acts against his own obvious interest just to prove he is free. Do people sometimes hurt themselves simply to show that they can choose?
— Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing.
- Sisyphus rolls his boulder to the top forever, and every time it rolls back down. Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy: how is happiness possible in meaningless repetition, or is that just a consoling lie?
- In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
- In García Márquez's Macondo, the dead talk with the living, rain falls for four years, and no one is surprised. Does magical realism make reality more real by making the miraculous ordinary?
- Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich only asks on his deathbed, what if my whole life was lived wrong? Why do people postpone authenticity to the very end while believing they are living correctly?