Kelly’s Reviews > War and Peace > Status Update

If we allow that all human life can be governed by reason, the possibility of life is annihilated. (Almost... there...!)

Okay, Prince Andrei is kind of my favorite, I admit it. Reading this part is sort of killing me on the inside. Whenever time travel is invented, I will need to make it a priority to argue with Tolstoy to get this ending changed. I shake my fist!

Those, however, who tried to understand the general course of things and wanted to take part in it with self-sacrifice and heroism were the most useless members of society; they saw everything inside out and everything they did to be useful turned out to be useless nonsense... In historical events what is most obvious is the prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Tolstoy's clearly complicated opinion of the "Great Man" presence in history is so fascinating to read about. He's clearly intellectually unable to buy into the idea that Great Men move the world or that Fate holds us all in the palm of its hand. But oh man, how he wants to and how he understands how others do. Tolstoy is so at his best on human frailty.

Without any one of these causes, nothing could have happened. Therefore, all these causes- billions of causes- coincided so as to bring about what happened. And consequently none of them was the exclusive cause of the event, but the event had to take place simply because it had to take place. Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and their reason, had to go from west to east and kill their own kind.

"You young people are very quiet!"
"We're philosophizing," said Natasha.

Pierre was struck for the first time by the infinite diversity of human minds, which makes it so that no truth presents itself to two people in the same way. Even those members who seemed to be on his side understood him in their own fashion, with limitations and alterations which Pierre could not agree to, since his main need consisted precisely in conveying his thought to others exactly as he understood it himself.

"There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another." (Austen does the shorter, more pragmatic version of the process Tolstoy's been describing to me so idealistically and painfully for the last hundred pages. Read as: There are lots of characters who need a hug.)

In Which Our Young Men Play At Growing Up. You know, with the help of the tragic fates of some women along the way. Of course.

Rostov began telling the story with the intention of telling it exactly has it had been, but, imperceptibly, involuntarily, he went over into untruth. {His listeners would not believe him and} ...Besides in order to tell everything one would have to make an effort with oneself so as to tell only what had been. To tell the truth is very difficult, and young men are rarely capable of it.