An accomplishment

At 9:30 on Sunday morning, I sat at my table with my coffee and read two words that caught me a bit off guard: THE END. To the southeast there were low, severe streaks of cloud through which the sun burst, off and on, off and on. It was brutally cold (by Portland standards) and windy. Finishing War and Peace left me a bit discombobulated. It was a little sad, in the way that the end of conversations you’re really enjoying are, but at the same time I felt quite a sense of accomplishment that may or may not have been misplaced. War and Peace is not as “hard” as its reputation, it’s just really detailed, and really long. So part of the sense of accomplishment I felt has to do more with me than the book: back when my vocation was getting liquored up every day and night, I couldn’t have even dreamed of finishing such a book. I probably couldn’t have even started it. That’s my own individual circumstance, which, as you’ll see if you ever read War and Peace, is, in an oversimplified, boiled-down sort of way, the book’s main point. Historical events – and that includes, among other things, wars, elections and marriages and divorces – are not the result of a grand, careful master plan but of random chances and circumstances set into motion by random individuals, some of whom are accurately portrayed by history, most of whom are not.

Does that theme require 1,200 pages? I have no idea, but I thought War and Peace, as a book, and the reading of it, as an experience, were well with the time and effort, and here are a few reasons.

First, it’s written by someone who knows his way around the language and knows how to populate the landscape of his theme with people. Even though it’s long and broad, there are only about 10 main characters. I was surprised at how often I would read a chapter, close my book, and then, while washing the dishes, or paying the electric bill, or filling a plastic bag with red lentils in the bulk section at the grocery story, find myself wondering what was going to happen to Natasha, and Sonya, and Andrei and Pierre.

Second, the experience of reading War and Peace is good exercise. I worry about my brain and how certain parts of it have atrophied – or are at risk of doing so – as a result of spending so much time in front of a computer. War and Peace is 1,200 printed, dense pages. There is one illustration – a map of one of the battle scenes. There are no links, no pictures, no videos, no sound tracks, no pop ups. I read the book with my eyes, which absorbed the information and presented it to my brain, which, I’m happy to say, is still capable of translating words into images of my own making. Reading a book like War and Peace is the exact opposite of an Internet experience in that it requires focus and patience.

Third, the familiarity of it is truly shocking. War and Peace was written in the 1860s, and yet, on each and every page, there we are. In pursuit of power and wealth, people lie and cheat and steal and scheme and misrepresent when it serves their purposes. They fuck it up (pardon my language) and then, sometimes, they get it right. I’ve had this sensation with nearly every classic I’ve read (I have not read many), and I used to find the familiarity factor disturbing. Have we not learned a single thing? I’d wonder. Now, thanks to War and Peace, I have a slightly different take on it. Do you ever watch or read the news and find yourself disturbed by the rapid speed at which our standards seem to be declining? Well, they’re not: our standards have been plenty low for at least 150 years. So, while it’s regrettable that we haven’t learned from history, thanks to War and Peace, I can say that when it comes to scraping the bottom of the integrity trough, we’re no worse than our ancestors.

Fourth, finally and closely related, War and Peace seems to me an amazing portrait of what it means to be human. No other book I’ve read has evoked in me such a powerful feeling, as if it were a memory of my very own, a sensation that rose up and off each and every page, a message that’s simple but not, that’s transmitted through the century and a half since its publication, that, in the end, is as follows:

This is how we are.