:: hope, at least, springs eternal ::

if you're wondering what this is all about -- I'm reading through tolstoy's war & peace and taking exhaustingly extensive notes. then I pick through them to discuss recurring themes, great passages, and how to get a life partner, and report back here. also, there are a lot of spoilers. this is your only warning.

- - -

BOOK 2, PART 3

"Meanwhile life -- real everyday life, with its essential concerns of health and sickness, toil and rest, and its intellectual preoccupations with thought, science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, passions -- went on as usual, independent of and apart from all potential reforms."

real life is made up of a lot of confusing layers of things, the top layer commonly being a compulsion to appear, to act, to say what everyone else is or approves of or wants to see. this section (parts 3 - 5, really), set so much in peacetime society, are full of hypocrisy and living for others' eyes. it's pretty hard to read.

pierre, for one, is still searching for good and true and right and finds only hypocrisy even among the masons, his latest hope. presenting, in his energetic zeal for good, an exhortation to his fellow practicers to return to sanctified freemason living -- actually adhering to what they claim to believe -- gets him on the outs with pretty much everyone. because nobody really wants to give their money away and stop drinking (they're rich and russian, duh, pierre). but even presenting what he thinks they already agree on, he is surprised by "the endless variety of men's minds, which prevents a truth from ever appearing the same to any two persons."
   pierre, meet disillusionment. it won't be the last time.

vera and berg, together again, want their lives to be as blandly identical to everyone else as possible. like, if there were an average, they would be it. excuse me while I gag in the other room.

once more becoming interested in living, realizing his life isn't, doesn't have to be over, andrei begins to look for happiness. he goes to the city to become an active participant again, and gets caught up in the social and political scene: both socially political and politically social (if that makes any sense).
   andrei, interested, intellectual, enterprising, efficient, yet so swayed by emotions and afraid of being loved, is idealistically looking for the perfect person and thinks for a while he's found it in the 'genius' speransky. well, spoilers, but speransky is a traitor; which our clueless prince should have caught on to earlier, because the guy even leaves the room "à la française." andrei also meets with disillusionment in speransky here, and becomes ashamed of all his "work" done during his season in town. it's talking, not doing; practicing, not preaching. he wants reality.
   in petersburg, he "did nothing, did not even think or find time to think, but only talked, and talked well, of what he had had time to think about in the country. He sometimes noticed with dissatisfaction that he repeated the same remark on the same day in different circles. But he was so busy for whole days together that he had no time to think about the fact that he was doing nothing."
   well, who is full of life and love and happiness? who makes mistakes when speaking french? who is fully herself, naive, honest, ecstatically throwing her whole being into the moment?
   natasha is love. natasha is life.
   andrei is bowled over.
   sigh.

"The less attractive a woman is the more constant she is likely to be," says andrei. natasha is not technically beautiful, but certainly striking. is this foreshadowing???

relationship tracker:
SUNKETY SUNK
natasha + boris

IN LOOOOVE
vera + berg
NEW andrei + natasha

soundtrack - raging, kygo feat. kodaline