Monday, July 18, 2011

Monday Man - Leo Tolstoy


I just got back from a camping trip with my husband and daughters. We were in the desert so my skin is still so dry and stuck to my head that I look like Skeletor from that show He-Man.

Camping with my family makes me feel guilty. When I was a kid my mom was the camping champion. She made magic at our two-burner Coleman propane stove. She worked so hard. We had full breakfasts of pancakes and scrambled eggs and bacon and my mom's camp dinners were more spectacular than anything I've ever cooked at home with a full kitchen and running water. She made sure we had an army-tidy tent and site too. No clutter allowed. On top of that, she wore fresh outfits and always looked amazing.

Yeah, I don't do any of that.

Another thing my mom used to do while camping (between looking after our complete and total comfort) was read Tolstoy. I couldn't believe a book could be as long as War and Peace. It was impossible to read it. A lot of what my mom did as a matter of routine seemed impossible.

Once when she was reading Anna Karenina I asked why she would read something that impossible. She said that it was a wonderful book and that Tolstoy always had something profound to say about the human condition. I blinked my eyes and then went back to turning the pages of my Seventeen magazine.

While we drove through Nevada's Great Basin on my own family's camping trip, I picked up the Kindle my parents gave me for Christmas, loaded with War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I'd read all my regular books. I'd read the Oprah magazine I'd bought at the gas station. Ten hours of road stretched before us. It could be avoided no longer. I started in on the first chapters of Anna Karenina.

I thought it was okay.

So then I came to this part when Levin returns home:

"He felt himself, and did not want to be any one
else. All he wanted now was to be better than before. In the
first place he resolved that from that day he would give up
hoping for any extraordinary happiness, such as marriage must
have given him, and consequently he would not so disdain what he
really had."

And then this:

"The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The
familiar details came out: the stag's horns, the bookshelves,
the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long
wanted mending, his father's sofa, a large table, on the table an
open book, a broken ash tray, a manuscript book with his
handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an
instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging the new life, of
which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his
life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: "No, you're not
going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different,
but you're going to be the same as you've always been; with
doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts
to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness
which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you."

In other words, Tolstoy reached up through the muted screen and twisted my heart in his big hairy fist just as we drove through Fallon, Nevada.

Nobody in my family is getting pancakes or steak in camp. My gnarly hair and dirty pants with pine sap on the butt will continue to render me barely presentable enough for a gas station bathroom.

But I read Tolstoy now.

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