I finished the last page of Anna Karenina as we pulled up to the gate at RDU last night. In this second reading I was delighted to find passages that I had forgotten and excited to reread my favorite exchanges again.

The heart of the book, for me, are the two primary relationships running parallel to each other. As one relationship blossoms, the other unravels. What is beautiful about the relationship that blossoms is that it does so because jealousies, hurt, and anger are confessed and forgiven. The other unravels under the pressures of mistrust, manipulation, and selfishness. These relationships aren’t as cut and dry as I portray them to be, as Tolstoy’s characters are too deep for that. But the observation is true nonetheless.

Levin is working through his heart where he got the notion of loving thy neighbor and at the same time seeing God’s revelation:

Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived at knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one’s neighbor reason could never discover, because it’s irrational.

Konstantin Levin struggles with the thought of death as he listens to his brother struggle to live:

Levin could not sleep for a long while, hearing him (his brother). His thoughts were of the most various but the end of all his thoughts was the same –death. Death, the inevitable end of all, for the first time presented itself to him with irresistible force. And death, which was here in this loved brother, groaning half asleep and from habit calling without distinction on God and the devil, was not so remote as it had hitherto seemed to him…

“I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten –death.”

He sat on his bed in the darkness, crouched up, hugging his knees, and holding his breath from the strain of thought, he pondered. But the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten one little fact — that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes, it was awful, but it was so…

The question how to live had hardly begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a new, insoluble questions presented itself — death.

In the following passage, Kitty reflects on why she’s drawn to Mademoiselle Varenka:

She (Varenka) always seemed absorbed in work about which there could be no doubt, and so it seemed she could not take interest in anything outside it. It was just this contrast with her own position that was for Kitty the great attraction of Mademoiselle Varenka. Kitty felt that in her, in her manner of life, she would find an example of what she was now so painfully seeking: interest in life, a dignity in life — apart from the worldly relations of girls with men, which so revolted Kitty, and appeared to her now as a shameful hawking about of goods in search of a purchaser.

My first summer reading list book is Anna Karenina. I devoured the book last year and am doing so again. Tolstoy’s knowledge of the human heart amazes me. I’ll be posting my favorite passages as I go. In this passage Konstantin Levin has just arrived at his home in the country after a number of days in Moscow:

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 handwritings. 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 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 happiness which you won’t get, and which isn’t possible for you.”

This the things said to him, but another voice in his heart was telling him that he must not fall under the say of the past, and that one can do anything with oneself. And hearing that voice, he went into the corner where stood his two heavey dumb-bells, and began brandishing them like a gymnast, trying to restore his confident temper. There was a creak of steps at the door. He hastily put down the dumb-bells.

I made a list and checked it twice. It was the list of books I checked out of the library today to fill my summer reading list. The stack of books makes me excited about the adventures that lie ahead in them. Most of the books are fiction and one of them, Anna Karenina, will be my second reading (one of my favorites). Some are new, such as Laughing Without an Accent, and some have been around for quite a long time, such as The Man Who Was Thursday. What are you reading this summer?

This weekend, we spent an evening meandering the streets of Asheville. One of the designs that caught my eye was this metal dancer that twirled in the wind. Loved it! A couple of still photos are below, as I can’t get the video I took to upload to YouTube. You’ll just have to imagine the wind catching his arms and leg, which then sends him twirling.