Light On Dark Water

You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, they tell us, but while the eggs are surely broken, the omelet is never made.

–Gary Saul Morson

Morson, a professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Northwestern University, makes that remark in a New Criterion piece about Alexander Herzen, a strange German-Russian writer of whom I knew no more than his name until I read this piece, an overview of his life and work (not online, unfortunately). 

I don't know that I agree that the omelet is never made. The one promised and envisioned by the revolutionaries certainly is not, and the result has often been much worse than no omelet at all. But there may be an omelet of sorts. I wonder sometimes: what would France have been if the Revolution had not happened? No doubt some novelist has written an alternative history based on that idea.