Too much good fortune can derail an artist, and few writers are born as fortunate as Dunsany.
This question becomes all the more pointed when it is added that rebirth is governed by karma, something that functions as a kind of cosmic justice: those born into fortunate circumstances do so as a result of good deeds in prior lives, while unpleasant births result from evil past deeds.
Some of us argue we were born less fortunate with little or no starting points.
But people who are not born on a fortunate date need not despair.
To prevent this way of thinking, Mr. Zeller prepared his sons and daughter from early childhood to think about those who were born into less fortunate circumstances.
His family, all sent to Auschwitz after the Nazis took control of northern Greece, where Mr. Nachama was born, was less fortunate.
Hailsham, where Kathy grew up as inmate before her "promotion", is mythologised for its special ethos: a Hailsham childhood is idealised, with somewhat grotesque and faintly Dickensian sentimentality, by those who were "born" into less fortunate circumstances.
"I was born into a fortunate situation, and far too many millions of people in this country are born into a tough situation," Fetterman said.
But empathy born in the fortunate inexperience of severe and widely practiced cruelties of war and authoritarian regimes cannot supply insight on the dark spaces of the psyche that open up to the individual desperately fleeing the injuries and trauma inflicted with a tyrannical and sadistic force.
By 1949, when Lieberman was born, they had been fortunate enough to survive the Holocaust and find their way to a displaced-persons camp in France.
