Where Good and Evil are borne

"We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found."

Tzvetan Todorov, Bulgarian-born French philosopher, historian, structuralist literary critic, sociologist and essayist (1939-2017)

The irony, which Mr. Todorov might have enjoyed, is that this brilliant quotation of his isn't to be found in a book, but is something he said during a conference. "Nothing is more commonplace than the reading experience, and yet nothing is more unknown," he wrote in Reading as Construction, 1980. Yes, but a sweet irony because he's still remembered.

I had the pleasure of meeting him once, briefly, at a small conference/book signing in the early 2000s. He struck as a man of sharp wit, and of piercing gaze. I still enjoy reading his book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.

He would have been eighty years old today.