I have had this experience three times now, on three different occasions, in admittedly similar circumstances, but not similar enough to explain the coincidence: I am speaking from a podium to a fairly large
audience on the topics of — to put it broadly — evil, suffering, and God; I have been talking for several minutes about Ivan Karamazov, and about things I have written on Dostoevsky, to what seems
general approbation; then, for some reason or other, I
happen to remark that, considered purely as an artist, Dostoevsky is immeasurably inferior to Tolstoy; at this, a single pained gasp of incredulity breaks out somewhat to the right of the podium, and I turn my head to see a woman with long brown hair, somewhere in her middle thirties, seated in the third or fourth row, shaking her head in wide - eyed astonishment at my loutish stupidity.
After a raucous first
general election debate where an unruly
audience saw an attendee removed from the theater and the candidates shouted over each other, often cutting each other off and going over their time limits, what will
happen at this final debate is anyone's guess.