The last station

“Everything that I know, I know because I love.” ~ Leo Tolstoy

AUTHOR Jay Parini has written a book en titled, “The Last Station.” It is a novel about the last year of Leo Tolstoy’s existence. Literary critics in my time proclaimed it as one of the “best historical novels.”

Jay Parini is a poet and Erica Jong’s commentary of this author and his book speaks for me too. “Poets who write novels are a strange and wonderful breed, in love with language as well as character.”

In “The Last Station,” Parini according to another critic tackled large themes – the ruthlessness of idealists, the desolation of spurned love, the torture of divided loyalties and succeeds where many fail.

Personally, for me, the key in my reading is to search for meanings that Parini has bestowed upon his characters to reveal in a language all their own about themselves in a place and time and their relationships with Tolstoy. What Parini did was expose his characters’ “torments, their hopes, and their crippling sense of isolation.”

Indeed, this is a good and engaging novel. In life, we could be that character in “The Last Station,” and the moments they encounter and endure are ours too.

Like Tolstoy, I may be entering my own “last station.” Perhaps, that is a morbid thought but who really knows. Besides, every journey has its last station whether it is about a man or a woman’s existence, a journey to foreign shores and lands, or the final minutes and moments of a game. It is the final stretch and we all want to make the most of it.

Tolstoy’s “last station,” is ideal for a nobleman in Tsarist Russia. But Parini makes Tolstoy more than just what he is as a good Russian of great political stature. He is a man who lives what his heart, beliefs, and principles tell him. In this way, his continuing labors to help his fellow human beings to gain freedom from disease, poverty, and tyranny in spite of his old and ailing physical condition are genuine.

Unlike Tolstoy, who was helped by his servants and followers (Tolstoyans) in completing his journey, many like me have to do it on our own. It is all for the best.

Tolstoy’s story on the matter of being helped by others in times of difficulties highlights a common degrading theme about the subject among human beings.

To help others is always noble, godly, and almost holy. In his “last station,” Jesus Christ breathed his last on the cross to save the human race from sin. In many a story that human beings helped someone, you will hear that tragic note, where the helpers after sometime require the person whom they help to repay them back, not in the same measure that they gave but with interest including the honor, if not the life of their victim. They will keep and sustain the rumor about your being an ingrate.

The truth is that people, in the very nature of an individual or social co-dependence and co-existence have and will be helped by someone or others. “No man is really an island by himself.” You cannot take this concept, gesture or action as if it is your own to dispense. It is a God-given gift or opportunity for all to exercise, share and sustain, when your turns come around, usually almost always.

But seeing how people have soured it, makes me pray hard about being delivered from the hands of men in times of need.

Over the past years, I saw how fast my body is undergoing degeneration. I had a stroke last year, followed by the worsening of my hearing and seeing senses. My nerves are degenerating too and we are on the watch for a developing prostrateproblem.

In spite of my condition, I pray that I will not go through my “last station” losing much of my dignity and honor. At the end of the day, God forbid that people will require from my children and my name so much false recrimination for having been some Samaritan to me. That is bad. Had I known, I may have spent my life preparing for this situation. It would have been really different then. On this day, I realize how it is important, in our journey in life, to leave matters like this in God’s hands.

The sounds and spoken word are slipping past me by. I am moving further away, like an immigrant, an outsider in a familiar world that is fast becoming a strange one to me – into a world of signs and images that I must strive to know and understand fast but at the same time are also becoming blurred.

It is not the end. In this my darkest moment of despair, I may yet hear his voice calling my name. Hope springs eternal in the human soul.