"Why weep for your hair when your head's cut off?"

"I want to live life," I said. 

"You may!" Called all the books on the thrift store shelves. "Own and us a million lives shall be yours!"

And yet, how easily I forfeited those lives when one particular life beckoned me to lay my bookish self aside and travel. 

I stopped hiding my hair under a plaid hat and became the fiery, sweet Ruby girl that one either loved or hated. I never had time to read, but I was making time to write stories, my only solace through those days when I wished for less drama and more tolerance, where I hated that I always had to defend beliefs I cared little for as I inwardly battled deeper questions none could understand because all they saw was that I wore dresses and didn't celebrate Christmas. I stepped on my first plane and sat by a boy for two weeks, a feat for a timid girl who couldn't carry a conversation with any guy, as I learned about some of what I might believe. I learned to love hiking, and suddenly it was essential that I fly several times a year. One of those planes brought me to Germany. I started my business somewhere along my path. Between it all, a broken heart told me I must do something outlandish, and so I went to my first writer's conference and found people to love my short stories. 

I broke out of myself, and then crumbled, exhausted, wishing that I might remember the simple bliss of being a bookworm. 

 

Bookworm: One who understands what it means to enjoy stories, who knows how to only find the stories worth enjoying, and needs no reason but to enjoy the story. 

One could say I was a pretentious reader. I only read what I wished. As a result, I liked just about everything I read. I could not understand how anyone could read a book they hated. If you loved books, you knew how to only pick up the books worth loving, was my reasoning. And you knew how to stay clear of any that might be potentially burnable.

For some odd reason, I was set against nearly every classic if it wasn't by Charles Dickens or Robert Louis Stevenson. I was such a bratty reader, I think. Because when it came to certain acclaimed authors, I wouldn't even give them a chance assigning them some ridiculous opinion of mine. 

Slowly, life begged of me something. My writing wasn't enough. Friendships were challenging. My eyes felt so wide, by naivety pierced, my inadequacy widened. I knew what I must do. I lengthened my bookshelf and began to read all the books I said I'd never read. 

 Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, John Steinbeck's East of Eden, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment are only a few among the many, many classics I thought would be inferior to my old favorites. What a silly, foolish child. 

And yet, I'm glad I waited to read them until I did. Because each offered a special answer I needed that very day, that before I would not have been able to accept, because I hadn't even known the question would need asking. 

What a lengthy introduction to let you all know a marvelous achievement! I read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy last year! It took me just about six months ;p It wasn't one of the books I'd said I'd never read. No, sadly, I had a copy, but never even planned to give it a thought one way or another. I simply owned it. Wasn't even worth a derogatory opinion. 

Through a course of fortunate recommendations, I had a strong desire to read this book. Only to find out my copy was abridged. I threw it away, quite upset. Then a new friend gave me her copy! Which I proceeded to ravish until it had lost its cover and I had tasted its magnificent treasures.

I was greatly disappointed in W&P, at first. The first four hundred pages were dull. When I at last figured out who the main character was, I hated him. He was obese, disgusting, repulsive, selfish. I had no pity for the horrid man. 

And then I loved him. 

And then I found myself turning back, rereading those first four hundred pages, and seeing incredible genius. "How did I miss this adorable scene where she asked the boy to kiss her doll? And then she kissed him?" How indeed. 

I found myself loving and hating nearly every character in their turn. 

I saw myself where I didn't want to. I saw what I might aspire to. I saw how evil unforgiveness is and immediately found myself forgetting and forgiving a wound so large I thought I would always cry over it. I found myself asking along with Pierre, What is liberty? What is suffering? Do we not find liberty, and even joy, when only we have found suffering and conquered it in our souls even as it tears into the soles of our feet? Is liberty and joy and suffering something one can separate? Must they be separated?

Of course, that is a paraphrase of many chapters. 

"the lice that ate him warmed his body pleasantly."

"If someone said to me right now, this minute: Do you want to remain the way you were before captivity, or live through it all over again? For God's sake, captivity and horsemeat!"

But as beautiful as was the realization that liberty is something within, not bound by outward freedom, but granted by a joyful awareness of worthiness, and as horrendous was the image of a bitter, unjust grudge held unto death, what made this book the most special was the image of marriage. 

"I must--however strange, however impossible this happiness--I just do everything to make it so that she and I are man and wife," he said to himself.

This little bit gave me chills. You must read it in its full context to grasp the full joy of this moment! 

Now, as he told it all to Natasha, he experienced that rare pleasure which us granted by women when they listen to a man--not intelligent women, who, when they listen, try either to memorize what they are told in order to enrich their minds and on occasion retell the same thing or else to adjust what is being told to themselves and quickly say something intelligent of their own, worked out in their small intellectual domain; but the pleasure granted by real women, endowed with the ability to select and absorb all the best of what a man had to show.

To be such a woman? Oh, we are told it is good to be witty, to be clever and smart, and know what to do about everything. But all the great women and men of old, the women who were true help-meets, were they not women who knew how to listen in such a way that the man knew what he must do, that the man felt himself worthily validated, that the man was more of a man because the woman listened just right to what he must say. 

The epilogue is where the fruit of the book is finally known. And how good it is! All of the chapters of the first part, but especially chapter ten, show marriage in a way that is most glorious. I love how Natasha takes to nursing her babies, though it's not "fashionable". I love how Mary calms her brash husband. I love how Pierre and Natasha become wholly more themselves as they are shown to be purely one. 

"After seven years of marriage Pierre had the joyous and firm consciousness that he was not a bad man, and he felt this because he saw himself reflected in his wife."

Despite all my anti-feminist talk, I have times where I cringe at certain parts of marriage. I do not like the idea of being told what to do, of being so vulnerable and weak and helpless. Mostly, because I fear what-ifs. Those fears aside, this book presents a glorious picture of what it means to be a husband and wife, man and help-meet, King and Queen. 

A queen, whose foremost duty is to her King, and yet privileged to be his utmost love, not a mere servant, but his closest companion. She is his; this is her prize, not her enslavement. The glory is something she gives to him, not something he steals from her. 

"After seven years of marriage Pierre had the joyous and firm consciousness that he was not a bad man, and he felt this because he saw himself reflected in his wife."

Yes, if fears distract, if feminists scream, if self demands glory all for self, then and only then will one not be able to see the full beauty displayed in being a woman that completes a man so wonderfully. 

It's a book one can't read lightly and say they love without having felt something profound, in a way that takes oneself out of self and placed in their proper place among mankind to serve. 

Have you read it, or any other Russian classic?