Juan García Madero’s Reviews > War and Peace > Status Update

Free will:

However many times experience and argument have shown a man that in the same conditions, with the same character, he would do the same thing he did before, he, when he sets out for the thousandth time, in the same conditions, with the same character, on an action that has always ended the same way, undoubtedly feels no less certain that he can act as he pleases than he did before the experience.

I keep thinking about all of pierre's stories... And how fluidly and sensically he transitioned between each one (his naïveté really being the only consistent driver). I know it might just because it's my current book, but he really could be the greatest character Ive ever experienced in fiction.

In about 8 pages, Tolstoy fleshed together Platon Karataev's person more effectively than probably most main characters in any other novel. He could stand on his own: without the novel, without the story, without Pierre, without the prison, and his essence would still effect a lust for that kind of wisdom. In the novel, though, he pretty much pushes over the dominoes that Tolstoy has been setting up for 1000 pages.

Chug-a-chug-a chug-a chug-a

"...the morals of the military estate are absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, depravity, and drunkenness. And in spite of that, it is the highest estate, respected by all.

It's a strange feeling when the only reason you realize you've been moved to tears is that it's harder to read through the refracted light entering your eyes. What the hell has happened in the last 100 pages?

Ok, just marking this explicitly so I know where to go if I ever just need to look at beautiful writing. I've never seen words paint a picture like this before.

A good commander not only does not need genius or any special qualities, but, on the contrary, he needs the absence of the best and highest human qualities--love, poetry, tenderness, a searching philosophical doubt.

Great, another book that forces me to remember my argument against fatalism. There goes my night.

Heroin:

All people seemed to be saving themselves from life: some with ambition, some with cards, some with drafting laws, some with women, some with playthings, some with horses, some with politics, some with hunting, some with wine, some with affairs of state. Nothing is either trivial or important, it's all the same; only to save yourself from it as best you can. Only not to see it, the dreadful it

If Gravity's Rainbow and JR were packets of sugar, War and Peace is a bowl of oatmeal with a few concentrated marbles of heroin mixed in.