The War is Over

On Sunday I finished War and Peace. It was bittersweet. I was glad to reach the end, but I was sad it was over. It was an amazing book, and now I want to go to Russia so that I can see all of the places I read about in person. I feel a strange connection to the country now (and a greater dislike for Napolean).

There are many parts of the book that I loved, but here is one my favorite passages, describing the transformation that war and captivity had on one of the leading characters (who will remain nameless, so as not to ruin it for Miss Kim who is pressing on through it).

"He could seek no object in life now, because now he had faith--not faith in any sort of principles, or words, or ideas, but faith in a living, ever-palpable God. In old days he had sought Him in the aims he set before himself. That search for an object in life had been only a seeking after God; and all at once in his captivity he had come to know, not through words or arguments, but by his own immediate feeling... that God is here, and everywhere... He felt like a man who finds what he has sought at his feet, when he has been straining his eyes to seek it in the distance.

In old days he had been unable to see the great, the unfathomable, and the infinite in anything... In everything near and comprehensible, he had seen only what was limited, petty, everyday, and meaningless. He had armed himself with the telescope of intellect, and gazed far away into the distance where that petty, everyday world, hidden in the mists of distance, had seemed to him great and infinite, simply because it was not clearly seen.

Now he had learned to see the great, the eternal, and the infinite in everything... The terrible question that had shattered all his intellectual edifices in old days, the question: What for? had no existence for him now. To that question, What for? he had now always ready in his soul the simple answer: Because there is a God, that God without whom not one hair of a man's head falls." (Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace. Barnes and Noble, 2006. Pgs 1005-1006.)

Isn't that beautiful? I hope to post more about War and Peace later, but there's a taste of Tolstoy's depth at least. Now I'm reading 'Til We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, which I hope will have some good blogging material in it.