"Imia Bozhie est’ sam Bog!"

How in God's name did the bizarre history of the mathematical model of infinity escape me all this time? Cantor was literally driven mad by his exploration of the meaning of "the set that contains all sets," but the Moscow School's models arose out of their reading of the restoration of the Jesus Prayer that had come into the news in 1913 when the Czar sent sailors to pry the heretical monks out of their Mount Athos monastery with clubs, water hoses, and bayonets, and haul them off bodily to the remotest Russian provinces. The Name Worshippers sparked a theological debate that gave the Russian mathematicians ideas:

http://www.tnr.com/article/76715/infinite-life?passthru=MDBkMjEwNTgzZjNhNGZmYjBhNzEzZTdiZmVlZDk0Nzg

I am tempted to quote extensively but the story deserves to be read in full. It segues into a whole host of other stories of forgotten aspects of twentieth century thought. There is more than one history of the world, as somebody wrote in some novel or other, even though the histories are the histories of dead ends.

The Labyrinth on the Sea

And while I am sailing around the Mediterranean with the monks extracted from Mount Athos, I should mention that yesterday I was delighted to receive word from HarperCollins that Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Prose contains a translation of The Labyrinth on the Sea, the book whose never-published earlier translation has led a phantom existence on booksellers' sites for a fair number of years.

The sample available from HarperCollins contains only the wondrous essays from The Barbarian in the Garden, which I have long loved, but that is enough to make me happy that they sent the notification only a few days before actual publication. Just to see if I can make it work, I'll even do HarperCollins' dirty work for free by embedding their Browse Inside stuff for the delectation of fellow Zbigniew Herbert fans:
or I would, if it worked right, which apparently it doesn't, not on my machine anyway. Have a go at it: