I just finished reading Anna Karenina, which I liked only slightly less than War and Peace, which I liked a lot. It only took me two months, which isn't bad for 800 dense pages. I liked the characters, especially the hunting dog, Laska, and I loved the luxurious outdoors descriptions of farming and hunting. I had to push myself to get through the drawing room/family stuff, especially when the narrative bogged down in wedding details, but it was worth it. His portrait of Anna, especially when she tries to charm Levin and when she loses her mind over the acceptance/rejection dance with Vronsky and dives under a moving train, was amazing.
There were two times I was struck with the knowledge that Tolstoy was writing from direct experience. I knew he'd witnessed someone killed by a train, and that the writing was exorcism, and I knew that this part was describing his own experience:
"And, happy in his family life, a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself. But Levin did not shoot himself or hang himself and went on living."
I read later that both of those impressions were true. I felt like I was able to identify it because of my own experience writing. I felt familiar with Tolstoy's process, which sounds arrogant but is no less true. I recognized it because I'd done it.
At the very end of the book, after Anna's suicide, starting at Part 8, Chapter 8, Levin has a spiritual awakening, reflecting Tolstoy's own, and it's expressed so well! It's what I experienced by working the 12 steps. We came at it in different ways, but the grace and the outcome were the same. He even attributes the fact that the Holy Spirit or God or whatever took pity on him and restored him with an improved faith to having been taught as a child to "live for the soul, to remember God." That is my belief as well, that if my parents hadn't given me a foundation, I wouldn't have been able to find what Tolstoy describes so well in these passages.
"I'll be dead by November," said Henry Rollins last month during his spoken word. What did he mean?! If only I could remember the context. My husband says I should see Jack White perform tomorrow night (he's #2 on my bucket list of musicians to see after Robert Plant) because maybe he'll be "dead by November" and I'll regret it the rest of my life if I miss him. Dead by November. Or whenever. And then? Will it matter that I read Anna Karenina? That I saw Jack White? I have what Tolstoy describes - a spiritual life that creates meaning, but I still wonder what it's all for.
