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Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoi knew
Everything there is to know about you
Emotional makeup, political views
Everything there is to know about you
--Bob Hillman
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11.27.01
I'm reading Anna Karenina again. The first time I was 13 or 14. I remember the bare bones of the plot, and somebody playing shuffleboard on a ship. Mostly, I remember how I felt when I read it.
A friend at work who majored in Russian came into my cubicle a few days ago and saw it sitting on my desk. "Anna Karenina was beautiful," he said wistfully.
Faulkner said something interesting about that:
The ideal woman which is in every man's mind
is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand.
The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement.
Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina
was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat.
Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful,
and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch,
and let the mind create the tree.
My mind has created the tree. She looks like a Russian Snow White.
It is satisfying to have such a fat book to read, because there is practically no chance whatsoever that I will run out of book during any boring, waiting errand during the next several weeks. And I can't get Bob Hillman's song lyrics out of my head:
Like epic poetry, old folk songs
Gargantuan themes, impossibly long
War and peace and right and wrong
Gargantuan themes, impossibly long
Anna Karenina the ill-starred lover speaks to me
She draws a breath and whispers my name
I'm exactly the same as a Russian count in 1823
And he's exactly like me
He's exactly like me
And that is what appeals -- the Gargatuan Themes. I always want to get to the meaning of things, to take characters out of books or life and shake them upside down until all the information about them has fallen out so I can know who and what they are. And you can never do too much thinking about family, love, life, morality, and death, if you ask me. And I don't want trite bumper sticker philosophy. I want Anna Karenina, a bazillion pages and three families worth of marriage, love, family life, and religion.
When I was 14, I most identified with Levin, who spends a lot of time struggling to find faith and worrying about death. We'll see if anything has changed since then.
Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoi knew
Everything there is to know about you
Emotional makeup, political views
Everything there is to know about you
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