My better self is defeated like Napoleon
Ifinished but I wish I hadn’t. I thought I wanted to be done with it. As much as I loved Natasha and Pierre and Nicholas and Maria, as much as I admired Tolstoy’s eye for social manoeuvering and bureaucratic absurdity, I resented the novel’s sheer size. It kept me from so many other books!
Turns out, it also kept me from despair. I started the book when we went into lockdown. I started it when my son’s March recital was cancelled but he still had one planned for May. When his brother, back early from college, was still interviewing for summer internships. When school closures were still ‘‘temporary’’.
When I started it, I took the ‘‘stay-at-home’’ order as an extended opportunity for selfimprovement, a government-mandated before and after, from which I planned to emerge transformed – at least within the confines of comfortable middle-age womanhood: 10 pounds lighter, with a Kondo’d closet and a newly acquired ability to conjugate Spanish verbs.
The media, social and otherwise, offered plenty of suggestions for how to ‘‘Make the most of quarantine’’, but I didn’t need prompting. My to-do lists were clipped poems of optimism. ‘‘Cycle 30/ push-ups and abs/walk.’’ Or: ‘‘Piano/Duolingo/
By the time I finished spring school closures in the US were definitive, summer plans were cancelled, and fall was up in the air.
Crossing off signalled the end of the Grand Project portion of my pandemic life. The media, social and otherwise, reassured me, ‘‘It’s OK not to be productive.’’ But I don’t need permission. I don’t make many lists any more. If it’s sunny, I take a walk. If we need bread, I bake some. Spanish can wait, as I myself am waiting.
But is not simply the last vestige of a more hopeful me. To read it is to revel in the idea of looking back.
Yes, it renders scenes of war in shattering, visceral detail, down to the prisoner who, before being executed by an ambivalent firing squad, adjusts the knot on the blindfold because it hurts the back of his head.
But it’s also about forgetting all that and moving on. It movingly relates Prince Andrei’s death and then finds his beloved years later, utterly devoted to a different man. The war is past; society is recovered; Moscow has been rebuilt. Characters with whom we’ve suffered the horrors and deprivations of war now find ‘‘reminiscences of 1812’’ to be a pleasurable topic of dinnertime discussion.
In people forget how bad things were. They romanticise the past and declare every decision Napoleon and/or Alexander made to be genius, even though it resulted in unthinkable carnage. Tolstoy gently mocks the human need, in the aftermath of this or that battle, to have it all make sense.
We need some people to see the past clearly; that’s why we have great novelists. We’ll need someone to show us President Donald Trump the way Tolstoy shows us Napoleon. Maybe even exactly the same way: ‘‘There is no act, no crime, no petty deceit which he would not commit, and which would not be at once represented on the lips of those about him as a great deed.’’
I looked up from the last page of to find myself stuck in the interminable now, at some point in the pandemic era. What comes next, we don’t know. How it will end, we don’t know. If it will end, we don’t know.
We are in Moscow in the middle of the siege. Will the invader ever leave? When will it be safe to come out of our houses? How many will die before it’s over?
If you’ve started and it’s taking you a while, don’t quit. But don’t rush to finish it either.