I haven’t been to Budapest, but I’ve done a lot of reading about the gulag and other repressive governments, and I spent a fair amount of time looking at different images online to get a flavor of the place.
Your idea on the book is a good one, but I didn’t give it much thought at the time. I think I took the idea that Aristotle influenced Thomas Aquinas and went from there, but my version of Diels would have been amused by the whiff of heresy.
I caught that influence of Aristotle on Aquinas and hear you. Forget I even mentioned it. The chapter is perfect as it stands. One other thing of note regarding your depiction of the prisons is that Berlin has recently set up a DDR Museum, which has one of the Stasi detainment cells on view as well. Horrifying stuff. Your story is very good in that regard, and it’s remarkable that you’ve been able to adapt these things so convincingly based on source readings and examination of photographs.
Have you been to the Museum of Terror in Budapest? I presumed that you had from the details in this chapter: the wire mesh over the glass windows of the cells, etc. It’s one of the most chilling museums I’ve ever been in. And when you go into the basement where the torture chambers were located, you can still smell human sweat. I got nauseated and had to leave.
As I was reading it, I was thinking of something that could’ve been a funny twist to the chapter. What if Diels caught the priest reading Bertrand Russel’s “History of Western Philosophy” instead of Aristotle? Russell won the Nobel prize for literarture in 1950 and that book was cited as one of the reasons the award went to him. But Russell was a notorious dyed-in-wool atheist. It would be funny to imagine a priest reading and how Diels would have reacted to a holy man reading something by a well-known heretical philosopher.
I detected no errors in this chapter, but there appeared to have been two spaces in between this sentence in the first paragraph: “...doubted its significance. On the far side...” of the Danube
I haven’t been to Budapest, but I’ve done a lot of reading about the gulag and other repressive governments, and I spent a fair amount of time looking at different images online to get a flavor of the place.
Your idea on the book is a good one, but I didn’t give it much thought at the time. I think I took the idea that Aristotle influenced Thomas Aquinas and went from there, but my version of Diels would have been amused by the whiff of heresy.
I caught that influence of Aristotle on Aquinas and hear you. Forget I even mentioned it. The chapter is perfect as it stands. One other thing of note regarding your depiction of the prisons is that Berlin has recently set up a DDR Museum, which has one of the Stasi detainment cells on view as well. Horrifying stuff. Your story is very good in that regard, and it’s remarkable that you’ve been able to adapt these things so convincingly based on source readings and examination of photographs.
Actually, I think the DDR Museum is over a decade old now. I’m getting so old that these things start to blend together in my mind.
Have you been to the Museum of Terror in Budapest? I presumed that you had from the details in this chapter: the wire mesh over the glass windows of the cells, etc. It’s one of the most chilling museums I’ve ever been in. And when you go into the basement where the torture chambers were located, you can still smell human sweat. I got nauseated and had to leave.
As I was reading it, I was thinking of something that could’ve been a funny twist to the chapter. What if Diels caught the priest reading Bertrand Russel’s “History of Western Philosophy” instead of Aristotle? Russell won the Nobel prize for literarture in 1950 and that book was cited as one of the reasons the award went to him. But Russell was a notorious dyed-in-wool atheist. It would be funny to imagine a priest reading and how Diels would have reacted to a holy man reading something by a well-known heretical philosopher.
I detected no errors in this chapter, but there appeared to have been two spaces in between this sentence in the first paragraph: “...doubted its significance. On the far side...” of the Danube