Living the Questions of War and Peace

Summer Solstice 2022: Living the Questions of War and Peace

How can an “old” novel of so much death contain so much life and hope for this time? A thank you note to Uncle Leo.

As grueling as this pandemic has been for my family, once it became clear we were in for the long haul, I felt determined to attempt something as a writer that felt like a venture into new territory. Something to occasionally take my mind off the misery in the world at large and the anxiety that we might get sick, even die, and become part of it; something to help endure the masking, distancing, and all manner of isolation from others, while being hemmed in for far too much time with the same three family members; and something to possibly to nourish me as well. Frankly, something to help me get out of bed everyday.

            In the last days of 2020, with a bit of breathing room during Christmas, I finally felt ready to delve back into a couple of dormant writing projects. And to try reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

            I found a used but clean hardback edition of the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky (the paperback binding seemed destined to the same fate as my scalp, to lose its children little by little), whose translations of Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, and Brothers Karamazov have helped make these some of my absolute favorite books.

            Well, now those books have company.

            Who even knows how many shelves in the world could be filled, and made to bend and sag, with all that’s been written about this legendary book. I don’t pretend to add anything to that scholarship in this space. But at the same time, to have felt this close to a book—especially this book, at this time in history— and not write something… that would feel somehow dishonest on my part, and a disservice to its enduring value and power. My parents raised me with the unwavering habit of writing a thank you note to honor special gifts. This little piece is my thank you note to War and Peace.

* * *

First, allow me to gush a bit.

            If you’ve never read War and Peace or even intend to, let me attempt to tell you, in my un-scholarly way, what I think all the hype is about: It is a remarkable, stunning book, in every respect I can think of as a reader and writer. Beautiful, daring, breathtaking, heartbreaking, line by line and page by page; intimate, and simultaneously grand; incisive, trenchant, and at times even truculent, when treating the “great men of history” and the historians who blindly worship them, while infused in equal measure with humility, especially before the most fundamental questions of human history and the Mystery that governs not only our lives but the far-reaching and ever-growing universe.

            Perhaps like many, I approached this icon suspiciously, wondering what it might say to us now in an age far removed from the entirely Euro-centric worldview of the 19th century, with its many dramas of self-absorbed counts, princesses, dukes, and fair maidens in waiting.

            I read slowly, at first intimidated by its reputation, but soon, and to my surprise, utterly enchanted, thoroughly enjoying taking my time. Novels with this many aristocratic characters have often bored me, but as with Anna Karenina, the power of Tolstoy’s prose— in turns lyrical, sweeping, and piercing as a sword— transcended all. I made copious marginalia, aware I was in the presence of a master with much to teach me as a writer and a man of faith.

            When I finally reached the end, on a Saturday morning eleven months later, I remember the moment clearly: I pushed back from my desk, looked outside at the crisp fall morning, and thought, How will I ever read another novel again? What more can any novel possibly be?

            Tolstoy takes a linchpin moment in history— the Napoleon-led French invasion of Russia in 1812— and delves deeply, opening up the years preceding it, the sagas of several families, the sociology of European society, and the study of History itself and how it simultaneously charts and obscures our way forward not only as countries, but as humans. In the unflinching, unapologetic, yet never gratuitous depictions of war’s horrors— physical, psychological, spiritual, economic, and environmental— one can feel the fire of that fierce pacifism which he came to practice later in life. At times, the third-person narrator even states bluntly that the powers of the world are entirely dishonest about war’s purposes and ruinous, far-reaching consequences, and the language created for it— found everywhere from quotidian conversation to the most “serious” of historical works, the latter of which the narrator also scourges pitilessly for this deception— serves only to strengthen that illusion, and obscure the reality. Ultimately, we all participate in creating war, or preventing it, and far too often we slip along on the major current, to our own general destruction.

            And yet it is not all battles and blood. Far from it. Through and with his characters and the landscape, we feel like intimate participants in this time and place. With meticulous skill and attention to defining detail (such as old Count Rostov’s quick, staccato gait and his “beetling eyebrows”), as well as tender attention to the movements of the soul (witnessed in the extended ebb and flow of Pierre’s dark night of the soul, or the deep grieving of Marya and Natasha as their beloved Count Andrei dies slowly before their eyes), Tolstoy brings the characters fully, colorfully alive, to a depth far beyond the page. We accompany them with all our senses engaged, our heart’s blood coursing, and our gut alternately laughing and clenching. Not only in the ballrooms and dining halls of the aristocratic manors, but on the too-thin river ice that swallows soldiers whole, and through the mud and blood-drenched fields littered with corpses of humans and horses, and up through the trees to the sky above, which, with its continual siftings of rain and clouds and wind, sunlight and moonlight and starlight, holds the divine presence paradoxically close and ever beyond our reach and comprehension.

            Following the intertwining sagas of three prominent Russian families, we come to understand, in fascinating detail, the growing threat of Napoleon’s invasion, moving steadily eastward across Europe like an evening shadow. And we are drawn in deeper too, into the long view, and watch as Tolstoy, with lawyerly logic, surgical precision, and masterful metaphors, deconstructs the traditional view that History is shaped by an elite sort of boys’ club, les grandes hommes, the great men (and women too, though not in this book) scattered throughout time “destined” because of their “exceptionalism,” or even “divine election,” to create paths onto which the rest of us are gravitationally drawn, and then obediently, inexorably, trod. Napoleon and Alexander I (of Russia), the two grandes hommes of this novel, are each displayed in their full pomp and circumstance— their mythic status, frankly, given the worshipful devotion with which they are followed, to death and beyond—and then slowly revealed, through extraordinary detail, as hollow, and more than that, as pathologically vain, dangerously unempathetic, and ultimately, in Tolstoy’s word for Napoleon, irrelevant. That word, used multiple times to bring down one of History’s most iconic figures, is Tolstoy’s shot through the heart of the “old” telling of History. And Tolstoy— himself a dead, white, European, once-aristocratic male who was able to devote five uninterrupted years to this novel, offers in place of that corpse a radically fresh view that is still worth paying close attention to today.

            I could go on, in great detail, about all that I admired, learned, or felt blessed to encounter in this book, which Tolstoy claimed was neither fully novel nor historical epic, but a marriage of both, transcending traditional genres in fealty to his own sense of Russia’s unique literary needs.

Suffice it to say for now that it’s a book that demands much of its reader, but gives so much more in return.

*******

That day in November, as I took a walk to let it sink in, I toyed first with the idea of putting the very fact that I’d read this book (every word on all 1200 pages) on my dang resume, or even as a door sign at our house. (“Please come on in, but wear a mask and wash your hands, and… by the way, someone here has read War and Peace.”) But more deeply, I wondered: What’s my response? How will I take in, learn from, and live out what I’ve read?

            I had no idea, so I decided I’d need to read it again. Now that I have, the gift this book is to me feels really in there to stay, part of who I am. I see even more clearly why it’s so admired— and also, why it intimidates. Not just for its length and density, which frankly deterred me for decades and which undoubtedly will continue to keep many from even attempting it. But also, once you get started, it can haunt you; yes, with depictions of violence and heart-wrenching grief and the existential anguish of its characters. But beyond the last page of the book, it haunts (like so much of the best literature) with big questions, upon which our future seems to depend. The kind of questions we’d often choose to bypass, since so “sweet is it / To sleep in the coolness / Of snug unawareness” rather than to answer when truth comes with a “fierce hammering / Of his firm knuckles / Hard on the door.” (From Gwendolyn Brooks’ brilliant poem, “truth”.) It provokes the sort of painful but ultimately healthy questions we can live with and into, deeply and well, as Rainer Maria Rilke once counseled a friend.

"I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet.

Pursuing the deep questions of War and Peace, living into where they lead, trying to respond to them lovingly without always demanding answers, the lives we save may be our own. And those of our Human Family.

            I know this has been true for me, on a different occasion. The one question that has most fundamentally changed my life was handed to me nearly twenty-five years ago by an ordinary-seeming man I’d just met in Haiti. His question, which I’m convinced was God’s voice speaking through him, was simple: “Well, what’s your response?”

            At the time, he was pushing me to grapple with the reality, the misery, I was witnessing in Haiti, and not become just another privileged visitor who consumes the experience and shits it out again the next day. That question, and the path it has led me on since that day, turned my soul inside-out and my personal and professional lives in a different direction, one that’s brought much suffering, and an abundance of heavenly treasure.

            And so I’ve tried to apply it since in other contexts, when I have an intuitive sense that I must live with something a while or even a long while. As is the case with War and Peace. I can’t imagine a book better suited to helping us live through this age right now, not even Camus’ The Plague.

            I dare to imagine Tolstoy brought into the writing of this book some of the questions that I found while reading it. And others I imagine perhaps found him as he wrote it, and came to turn and shape his life thereafter. The questions regarding the horrors of war, short and long-term, surely had some role in steering him toward the pacifism and asceticism he adopted later in life. The questions of love, death, and our need for loving, just relationships in family, community, and society surely influenced his deep, ecumenical Christian practice, and his commitment to living his values at great risk (even eventually renouncing his wealth and works, and embracing a form of anarchism), much admired by Dorothy Day and others.

            The questions which demand response in my own soul, living in this particular moment of history— of pandemic, increasingly common and powerful autocracies, and addiction to violence of all forms— arise repeatedly in the book’s second half: What is power? What forces move peoples? How free, or determined, are we, to choose our path in life, for good or evil? They both contextualize the various characters’ journeys, and come up for explicit treatment in some of the book’s so-called philosophical sections. (Though I support the desire to encourage more folks to read this masterpiece, I cringe when I hear about abridged versions which excise these chapters; to me, they are indispensible.) In weighing the relative influence on history of grandes hommes or will of the people, and of freedom or determinism, Tolstoy seems to place his bets (reminding me of Pascal’s wager on belief in God) with an early-Christian sort of democracy—in which all are empowered, just as all peoples receive the Holy Spirit, not only “the elect”— and freedom— the capacity of individuals to choose good or evil in any particular moment.  But ultimately he hands it over to Mystery, and points at Her as the source of power that moves peoples, the source of freedom and the vast, inscrutable container in which we are held, with laws that are only seen clearly in time: the longer the time, the clearer the vision.

            From his distance of more than 150 years since publishing this book, Tolstoy challenges us to confront and wrestle with our demons. Why are we still obsessed with the grandes hommes of today, the Trumps and Putins and Bolsonaros, and are we not, in hanging on their every word and stupid stunt, and in some cases going where they point, doing exactly as Napoleon and Alexander’s troops did when marching straight across river ice they knew would break? Why do we gawk endlessly at the plutocrats and celebrities, the folks who are “exceptional” in some way that, in the long run, matters very, very little, and who catch our attention because of how splashy they are, not for their contributions to humanity or the planet. Why do we give them so much power? Why do we so desperately need to be distracted and entertained, and why do we choose to do so by following the salacious and sensational? How can we reorient mind and soul to give them less attention, and then later to keep them from exerting, or even possessing, such power in the first place?  Why are we hooked on all sorts of things that are quick-stim and quick-fix, especially our gadgets and their games and “networks?” And why do we not notice, or even seem to care about, how this addiction weakens our critical intelligence, distances us from our individual and collective Story, and disconnects us from a greater sense of belonging and meaning, one we derive when we believe we’re genuinely part of something eternal and true?

            And, for the love of God, why are we so addicted to violence, and turn to this to address all of the above— our feelings of impotence, anguish, alienation, and despair? When we make guns so easily available, are we not setting the stage for the kind of power-play executions we see Pierre nearly fall victim to in this book? When we pour hundreds of millions of dollars, and a seemingly equal amount of hours, every day into the creation and perpetuation of war— as a supposed way of keeping the peace, of addressing and quelling violence— are we not burning our own homes as some Russians did to preclude French soldiers from occupying them, and preventing ourselves, “win or lose” the war (in reality, we all lose in war) from ever truly living at home again?

            And how can we have the courage to truly feel the violence of today without being destroyed by it? Whether in Ukraine or Uvalde, whether in racism or sexism, whether in the language of hatred and division and blame, or any other form of violence, how do we respond to it honestly, with a tender, broken heart that remains strong and hopeful despite of or even because of its wounds?

            This is the kind of heart we need, to stand against the long history of violence, to summon our true human freedom and power, and unite it with Mystery, to create a new, fresh, nonviolent (or at least, less violent) future.

            This is the heart we need as prophets and pilgrims, and frankly as global citizens. One that can believe in and bear witness to Mystery, live in the creative tensions of family and community, and resist the tide of despair, materialism, and instant gratification of the dominant culture, patiently seeking the quieter, richer joys which truly generate life.

            For these and other questions which I may yet discover, I’m humbled, and grateful.

            There’s nothing like the electric feeling of starting to read a book I’ve never read before and that I’m excited about. I only regret that, from now on, that book will not be War and Peace. But I take consolation in feeling that it is rich enough, deep enough, for the long haul. The questions which it challenges me to live into, and respond to long-term, will endure, if I’m faithful.

            So I thank you, Uncle Leo, for this marvelous gift of a book, to me and to all of us. As part of my gratitude, I pray to try to bear witness to your labors, to the Spirit which moved through you, by living the questions: to let them settle deeply in my richest soil, to grow roots, and to bear abundant fruit in God’s “slow work” way.