Happiness Is...?

Vronsky meanwhile, despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires.

When you read great, older books, one of the things you need to get used to is the formulation of thoughts and concepts which have been parroted in the years since. Things which might seem obvious or concepts which we might have already encountered and accepted are at risk of being dismissed too quickly if we forget the context in which the original author wrote them.

I don't even know if Tolstoy was the first to express the above sentiment; he might have been, he might not have been. I definitely agree with it, though; it's a thought I've encountered several times and one which I can't find fault with. To desire is human, and yet achieving one's desires leads only to a new set of desires. This applies easily to physical phenomena: money, cars, houses and the like. But with relationships it's a little trickier.

Part of the problem, I think, is that people treat the people they have relationships with as objects, as static beings who will always remain the same. People act surprised when other people change, they cite it as a reason for relationships to end, when the reality is, everyone is always changing. Everyone, everything is always in a process of becoming. So by the time you "get" the person that you want, that person has changed, has become someone else. The only thing you've gotten is a shade, a memory of who they were a day, week, month or year ago. Worse yet, in pursuing what they were you are missing out on what they are, on the person standing in front of you.

I watched Bridges of Madison County on Valentine's Day (I inadvertently did a lot of romance-related watching that day, including the When Harry Met Sally commentary), and spent most of the movie pondering whether or not Meryl Streep's character was right - not to feel the way she did, since that can't really be controlled, but in the decisions she made. For those who haven't seen the movie, her character is married with two kids, and meets Clint Eastwood while her family is away for a week. They share a blissful, love-filled 4 days together, at the end of which he asks her to leave with him. She doesn't.

So one of the things I wondered was, is this sympathetic? Do I feel sorry for her character and her decision to stay in a respectful but loveless marriage and life? And in the end, I don't think I did; or perhaps it's more correct for me to say I don't think you're supposed to. Obviously, it wasn't a great situation. But she made her choice, and it was not a bad one; she stayed with the husband who had always taken care of her, who had always provided for her; with the kids she had raised, who she wouldn't have felt right abandoning. The point is made that loving Clint Eastwood's character the way she did was the only thing that allowed her to get through her life on the farm, that her perfect, unfulfilled love gave her the strength to stay, and that had she gone with him, eventually she would have come to hate him. Maybe the only reason she stayed in love with him was precisely because they were never able to be together.

It also makes you think - all those marriages that lasted for so long, how many of them were like that, in how many of them was at least one of the people filled with a secret identity, a secret longing for something more that they hid, how many of them had hidden thoughts that their partner never even came close to knowing? And I don't mean to suggest that you have to know everything about the person you're in a relationship with; in fact, I think there's (or there should be) an essential mystery to other people that you can never truly understand. But there's a difference between completely censoring a side of yourself and the aspects of yourself which are unknowable to anybody other than (sometimes even including?) yourself. How many people today live these sham relationships, pouring their affection into someone who doesn't exist, into someone they've created in their own mind, into some ideal they project onto the other person? What does it say about people if the only way the majority of them can stay together is through suppressing elements of their personalities? Is that even true? Am I being a bit harsh? I don't even know anyone who's been in a long-term marriage or relationship that I could ask these things to.

Known Unknowns

In the disagreements that occurred between the brothers during their discussions of the peasantry, Sergei Ivanovich always defeated his brother, precisely because Sergei Ivanovich had definite notions about the peasantry, their character, properties and tastes; whereas Konstantin Levin had no definite and unchanging notions, so that in these arguments Konstantin was always caught contradicting himself.

It's somewhat odd (or maybe it isn't; maybe this happens to most people who read the book), but as I read Anna Karenina, I find myself less and less interested in Anna's story - I think because it's an old story (or perhaps, to be more precise, it's a story which has been retold many times up to the present day), one which I feel familiar with. Levin, on the other hand, I find a fascinating character, possibly because he's the one I feel the most parallels with. He's supposed to be fairly representative of Tolstoy himself, according to the introduction of the edition that I have.

Yay?

I've never held many passionate thoughts or opinions. I don't mean to say I don't care about things, what I mean is that a lot of the ideas I have I'm willing to question or doubt, depending on whatever perspective I'm faced with or what I feel at any given time of any given day. I can argue something passionately one day and then say something completely opposite the next day. I think people who talk to me a lot find this intensely irritating at times. Is this intellectual, is it an expression of the knowledge that I know nothing, that there are no absolutes in life? Or is it human hypocrisy, is it just the natural tendency of people to say one thing when examining a situation in an objective, academic fashion and then act differently when their own desires come into play? Or some combination?

See, even now I'm unable to find a definitive answer.

I notice, when I'm in conversations, that I tend to ramble all over the place, that I'll mention something to try to illustrate a point and it sets me off on some other tangent, and by the time I finish that I've forgotten what the original point I was trying to make was. I had an acting teacher tell me that that, and my vocal patterns, were symptoms of a restless mind, that my brain's moving so quickly and so (to everyone else's mind) randomly that my mouth struggles to keep pace. I can focus on subjects and on single arguments - to write a thesis paper, for example - but when given the chance to do otherwise my mind tends to work in a far less structured manner. I don't feel that I'm particularly creative or inventive, I just have such wide-ranging interests and knowledge that they all compete to be shown off.

That makes me sound like an insufferable ass, and I suppose that's how I come across sometimes.

I also find it interesting that Tolstoy's style is far more polemical than his Western counterparts; where they had begun to move towards a more disinterested commentary on the characters in their novels (to give you an idea of where Western fiction was at this time, Middlemarch was written around the same time, 5-6 years earlier), Tolstoy's perspective and his beliefs are fairly easy to detect in the tone he adopts towards various characters and lifestyles. He certainly doesn't seem to have much sympathy for Anna, which makes the decision to center the book around her even more interesting, especially when many of the "secondary" characters are as if not more realized.