I should check, but I think I've already blogged here about my current reading, To the Finland Station, by Isaiah Berlin. It is one of the major sources for Mr. Stoppard's trilogy, The Coast of Utopia
But sharing my reading list with you isn't the point of this post. Rather, I'm calling your attention, albeit belatedly, to two articles in the February 25, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books. In that issue are two brief sketches or reminiscences about Isaiah Berlin, one by Nicholas Kristof entitled Explorer and the other by Charles Rosen entitiled, Gossip. These two stories are behind the paywall at NYBook.com, but just in can you are already smart enough to subcribe to NYRB online, here's the link to the stories. (By the way, I'm not necessarily recommending the pay website for NYBR as I'm not sure it actually works right.)
The article in the dead tree edition is illustrated by the estimable Dominique Nabokov. (Who for reasons beyond my understanding isn't included in Wikipedia and I'm far too lazy to even consider creating an article for her.)
Here are some snippets from the two articles that might inspire you to read more, or not.
No one surpasses Berlin as a guide through the tangled terrain of
the twenty-first century.
<snip>
Berlin was a masterful historian and critic. He is widely known today for his brilliant essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” explicating the deep contradictions in Tolstoy’s genius, and he also breathed new life into many other great thinkers, from Machiavelli to Alexander Herzen. In particular, Berlin liked to explore the dark side—those philosophers who challenged the assumptions of the Enlightenment and, in some cases, laid the groundwork for modern totalitarian impulses.
<snip>
“I am not a relativist,” he noted in “The
Power of Ideas.” “I do not say ‘I like my coffee with milk and you like
it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration
camps.’” Finding the boundary between what can be tolerated with gritted
teeth and what is morally intolerable may not be easy, but that does
not mean that such a boundary does not exist.
<snip>
No author who has ever lived has shown such powers of insight into the variety of life—the differences, the contrasts, the collisions of persons and things and situations, each apprehended in its absolute uniqueness and conveyed with a degree of directness and a precision of concrete imagery to be found in no other writer. No one has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour, the exact quality of a feeling—the degree of its “oscillation,” the ebb and flow, the minute movements (which Turgenev mocked as a mere trick on his part)—the inner and outer texture and “feel” of a look, a thought, a pang of sentiment, no less than of a specific situation, of an entire period, of the lives of individuals, families, communities, entire nations.
