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One thing I love about Tolstoy's War and Peace is how it describes how individuals can cycle through absorbing worldviews, philosophies, causes and projects acr
by lordleft 4y ago
One thing I love about Tolstoy's War and Peace is how it describes how individuals can cycle through absorbing worldviews, philosophies, causes and projects across the arc of their lives. They feel adrift, then find some great cause to push them forward, exhaust the possibilities of that cause, and find themselves disillusioned when they discovered that they have not "solved" the problem of life. This happens over and over again to some of the central characters of the novel, Prince Andrei and Pierre.
This is not to disdain projects or causes. The older I get, the more I realize that life is a continually evolving question, and the task of living philosophically is partially about living comfortably with the ambiguity that that implies.
- kirse 4y agoit describes how individuals can cycle through absorbing worldviews, philosophies, causes and projects across the arc of their lives That is pretty much the theme of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, written many a moon before War and Peace. You have a king who cycles through everything he thinks he could possibly desire, attaining all of it, and realizes at the end the answer to the problem of life was... well, I'll let you figure out the rest: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%201&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...
- teg4n_ 4y ago
- bryankam 4y agoLove this! I too got the sense of growing through phases via fiction. And your comment is surprisingly similar to what I said about War and Peace recently here! https://kite.link/Fiction https://kite.link/Fiction