Notes and excerpts from the novel War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
These times keep getting stranger and stranger.
The COVID-19 pandemic keeps us socially distant, digitally dependent, and teetering on an edge of uncertainty.
The economy is in shambles.
The geopolitical relationship between the US and China is disintegrating.
And over the past week the tragic killing of George Floyd, protests, and riots have ratcheted up local, racial, and political tensions.
It’s like we’re living in a big tinderbox and every day presents another series of sparks.
There are many ways to respond to these conditions, and I plan on putting some thoughts together on that topic in a future article.
In the meantime, in today’s article, I’m going to highlight one place I found peace, truth and inspiration in this storm: Tolstoy’s brilliant novel, War and Peace, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Like many others across the world, I decided to dive into War and Peace during these unprecedented times. I finished the book a few days ago, after nearly two months of daily reading. Here are a handful of my notes, along with three of my favorite excerpts.
Notes
Even though it was written more than a century ago, this book can teach you something powerful — perhaps about the world, or the human condition, or societal expectations, or yourself. The book certainly lived up to the hype, and I highly recommend picking it up, right now.
At 1,200-plus pages, the book seemed daunting, especially early on when I was still struggling to keep track of all the characters and story threads. However, it all started clicking about 400 pages in for me. From then on it was really a joy to read.
The sheer strength of the writing amazed me. Specifically, it’s astounding to witness the deep levels, and wide ranges, of emotion, complexity and connections Tolstoy creates using such simple words and sentences.
In addition, he’s somehow able to paint fantastic scenes of war, next to colorful cultural, political and social events, followed by intricate articulations of politics and philosophy — weaving them all together in a moving and compelling way.
Even the epilogue — which could be a book all its own — blew my mind. Tolstoy closes it out with a deep dive into the philosophies of free will, determinism, power and history that lie at the core of the novel.
Excerpts
Here are three of my favorite excerpts from this treasure of a book (emphasis mine).
1. From Volume IV, Part Three, Chapter XII: This connects to free will, Mythology mobility and the general Less is more philosophy that’s constantly revealing its relevance to me these days (For example, see My first 48-hour fast, Bringing it all back home, or My Media Diet 2020).
In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity; but now, in these last three weeks of the march, he had learned a new and more comforting truth — he had learned that there is nothing frightening in the world. He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree. He had learned that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and that those limits are very close; that the man who suffers because one leaf is askew in his bed of roses, suffers as much as he now suffered falling asleep on the bare, damp ground, one side getting cold as the other warmed up; that when he used to put on his tight ballroom shoes, he suffered just as much as now, when he walked quite barefoot (his shoes had long since worn out) and his feet were covered with sores. He learned that when, by his own will, as it had seemed to him, he had married his wife, he had been no more free than now, when he was locked in a stable for the night. Of all that he, too, later called suffering, but which at the time he hardly felt, the main thing was his bare feet, covered with sores and scabs. (Horsemeat was tasty and nutritious, the saltpeter bouquet of the gunpowder they used instead of salt was even agreeable, there were no great cold spells, and walking in the daytime always made him hot, while at night there were campfires; the lice that ate him warmed his body pleasantly.) One thing was painful at first — his feet.
On the second day of the march, when Pierre examined his sores by the campfire, he thought it would be impossible to step on them; but when everybody got up, he went along limping, and then, having warmed up, walked without pain, though by evening his feet were still more frightful to look at. But he did not look at them and thought of other things.
Only now did Pierre understand the full force of human vitality and the saving power of the shifting of attention that has been put in man, similar to the safety valve in steam engines, which releases the extra steam as soon as the pressure exceeds a certain norm.
2. From Volume III, Part Three, Chapter I: Next, I got a kick out of the following analogy that connects calculus concepts to historical science. In essence, you can’t understand history — or the “movement of mankind” — by analyzing one leader or event (discrete random variables); rather, you need to study the sum of all related movements (continuous random variables), and that’s accomplished by finding the area under the curve, through integration. History, conflicts, pandemics, victories, defeats, protests, mobs, love and loss, war and peace — they’re not caused by any one thing — they’re all caused by somany things — even everything.
For human reason, absolute continuity of movement is incomprehensible …
A new branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients, in examining questions of movement, allows for infinitesimal quantities, that is, such as restore the main condition of movement (absolute continuity), and thereby corrects the inevitable error that human reason cannot help committing when it examines discrete units of movement instead of continuous movement.
The same thing happens in the search for the laws of historical movement.
The movement of mankind, proceeding from a countless number of human wills, occurs continuously.
To comprehend the laws of this movement is the goal of history. But in order to comprehend the laws of the continuous movement of the sum of all individual wills, human reason allows for arbitrary, discrete units …
Only by admitting an infinitesimal unity for observation — a differential of history, that is, the uniform strivings of people — and attaining to the art of integrating them (taking the sums of these infinitesimal quantities) can we hope to comprehend the laws of history.
3. From the Epilogue: This final excerpt touches on the recurring conflict between freedom and necessity — or free will and determinism — that’s beautifully articulated throughout the book.
In actual life, every historical event, every human action, is understood quite clearly and definitely, without the least sense of contradiction, even though each event appears partly free and partly necessary…
The ratio of freedom to necessity decreases or increases depending on the point of view from which the action is examined; but this ratio always remains inversely proportional…
Reason says: (1) Space, with all the forms which its visibility — matter — gives it, is infinite and cannot be conceived otherwise. (2) Time is infinite movement without a moment’s rest, and cannot be conceived otherwise. (3) The linking of causes and effects has no beginning and can have no end.
Consciousness says: (1) I am alone, and all that exists is only I; consequently, I include space; (2) I measure fleeting time by the unmoving moment of the present, in which alone I am conscious of myself as living; consequently, I am outside time; and (3) I am outside cause, for I feel myself to be the cause of every manifestation of my life.
Reason expresses the laws of necessity. Consciousness expresses the essence of freedom.
Freedom, not limited by anything, is the essence of life in the consciousness of man. Necessity without content is man’s reason with its three forms.
Freedom is that which is examined. Necessity is that which examines. Freedom is content. Necessity is form.
Only by the separation of the two sources of cognition, which are related to each other as form to content, do we get the distinct, mutually exclusive, and unfathomable concepts of freedom and necessity.
Only by their union do we get a clear picture of the life of man.