Making the simple look easy …

… The Lightning Before Death: A Tribute to Clive James - The Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Solzhenitsyn can imagine what pain is like when it happens to strangers. Even more remarkably, he is not disabled by imagining what pain is like when it happens to a million strangers — he can think about individuals even when the subject is the obliteration of masses, which makes his the exact reverse of the ideological mentality, which can think only about masses even when the subject is the obliteration of individuals.

It doesn't get more insightful than that. Good to keep an eye out for that ideological mentality. It is despicable and dangerous.