Life seems to slow around the holidays. We get a bit fatter and more content, and we check out to cruise into January. I feel that big time this year. It's ok. I'm riding the waves of the cosmic ocean instead of fighting them.
I wrote something earlier about Leo Tolstoy, but I realized that wasn't what I wanted to write about. Not exactly. I wanted to write about a theme that stands out in his work; acceptance.
Though I'm certain my understanding of him as an author is incomplete because I haven't (yet) read his monumental novels, I'm currently enjoying a collection of Tolstoy's novellas and short stories. They share the same characteristic realism that made him a legend, so I assume this idea of acceptance is present in War and Peace and Anna Karenina as well. The elegance and severity with which it is described has struck me.
In what I've read, Tolstoy forces his characters to face the harsh realities of life, rationalize what they've experienced, then move on. Accept them. He walks the reader through the thoughts of these people, characters who elicit remarkable empathy due primarily to their relatability. They feel raw and nearly interchangeable with the reader. What they must grapple with are what we all meet in our journeys, eventually; love, death, betrayal, hope, pride.
I wonder why these parts of the human experience, quite literally the most common, inescapable, inevitable conditions in life, the fundamental emotions we share with all before and after us, can be so difficult to accept. I image this is because their true manifestations can clash with our notions of how they ought to be. When a fundamental belief is challenged by the facts, I guess, the foundation shakes. The first instinct is to reject reality--to assume what you believe, not what you see, is true.
The ability to revise deep notions of the workings of the world, of how justice and the personal narrative play out, might be the dividing line between adulthood and childhood. It takes a mammoth excursion of willpower to overwrite an ingrained worldview. Maturity, it might be called.
Then, after experience teaches, the student must react with moderation, for the slope to pointless nihilism awaits. I think teenagers often slip this way before climbing back up to a plateau of reasonableness. It's part of the learning process. It's easy to extrapolate and discard all prior beliefs after witnessing and accepting a reality in contradiction to the world imagined before. Nothing is real and nothing matters because my expectations turned out more fantasy than truth. This view is unproductive but makes sense, to me, in the aftermath of a foundation-shaking realization.
The process of acceptance, with its mental gymnastics and logical jumps, is Tolstoy's mastery. It seems very Russian of him to write about this; from what I know of that country, its culture has a distinct blend of romanticism and realism, a pedestal upholding a brutal history and lofty ideals side-by-side, exquisite ballerinas twirling in the sub-Arctic blizzards. Maybe it's a stereotype. But I get the feeling they place great value in their collective retention of beauty amidst acknowledgment of the harsh real world. The balance makes for a special people, and the balance is what Tolstoy's writing explores.
