the great leslie

I finished reading Anna Karenina this morning. It was required reading the summer before my senior year at St. John's College, and though I thought I had really read it, I didn't remember much. It's possible I only "read" it. That happened in my college days. More than once. I don't know what inspired me to pick it up last month. I just woke up one morning with the notion, and since it was right there on my shelf, it was pretty easy to make good on that notion. That summer at St. John's, I remember feeling like I "was about to jump off a cliff." The last year of college was soon to begin, and I knew leaving St. John's was going to be a big deal (I was right about that; I'm still getting over it). I feel that way this summer, asking myself "Why am I here?" and "What am I doing?" and feeling that I'm going to have to jump pretty soon.

Tolstoy sets the most amazing scenes. As Karenin inquires about a divorce, the lawyer is surreptitiously catching moths that have been eating his furniture. As Karenin leaves, without a quote for the cost of the procedure, the lawyer catches a moth and thinks of the velvet furniture he will buy...presumably with Karenin's money. So the moths not only propel the scene, they end it. And symbolize what is eating Karenin and his marriage. Tolstoy does similar things with soup, blades of grass, and toothaches. His attention to detail has readers dancing at the ball, cutting hay with peasants, and waiting with the agitated Levin as his young wife is in labor.

Anna and Levin look at life and ask the same questions: "What am I? Where am I? And why am I here?" They both consider suicide. Anna, fallen, looks at life and finds only hate in humanity and suspicion in love. She can only grasp the bad, and perhaps, really was the "horrid woman" Society said she was. Still, one wants to love her, because of her beauty and beautiful hands (Tolstoy loves to mention her beautiful hands. They are as omnipresent as Homer's "rosy fingers of dawn."). She is bewitching, but tormented. In the end, she throws herself in front of the train.

Levin agonizes over the question of why; he won't carry his gun, nor a length of rope lest he use them to end his life. But, one day, he looks up at the sky and finds the goodness that is in everything. "My life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it."

I don't know why Levin finds the good and Anna cannot. They both have love, means, and education. But this is the way it is in the world: some of us find the good; some find the evil. The question is still "Why?" and that's a question that we all have to answer for ourselves, in our own time.