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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Wednesday, July 27, 2016

entry arrow12:35 AM | The Architect of Happiness

Come over to the Philippines! It's where thrilling fiction comes alive! Here you can be Tessie Hutchinson from Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," and you have just received the black mark. You can be the chosen child from Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," and you're about to enter the room without windows. Or you can be the baby in this passage from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: "Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?" Welcome to our happy, happy land. Happy reading.



[Image swiped from Shakira Sison, who has this rejoinder: "Can we make it a rule that if you feel this way, you should be willing to offer your child as sacrifice?"]

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