Like A Current Beneath

Ahh, Karenin, you were almost at peace with your hate. Oblonsky tried to sway you.  Dolly tried to sway you.  What a sad figure you cast beside the all but realized love of Kitty and Levin.  Christian forgiveness clawing at you  But and beyond your reach.  And what could we do but acknowledge the wrong done to you?  Admit you had been wronged.  There wasn't much point any longer in seeking reconciliation.  

It is at precisely this moment, when we’re almost forgetting why we liked Anna in the first place, that her note arrives suggesting she’s dying, begging Karenin to come back home.  All his doubts so tangible. Could it be feigned?  We who have perhaps read the story before and still have another six hundred pages to go begin to wonder ourselves:  certainly Anna doesn’t die here?  

And what a scene.  Karnenin must face Vronsky and he Karenin.  And Anna is at death’s door, delirious, desirous of absolution.  Tough guy Vronsky breaks down and cries and begs Karenin to let him stay.  Vulcan-like Karenin becomes emotional.  And it strikes one that in an era when so many men, Tolstoy included were involved in duels, and where the expected way to handle such an affront between men at that time would have been to have a duel, these two are instead, bought together.  And one sees the subtle, plausible power of Toltoy's Christian message of peace that runs like a current beneath the dry necessities of daily life’s ambitions, and greed and desires.

It had been too long since we’d had a session where my younger daughter really cared what happened on the next page.  Levin’s meanderings about farming methodologies began to drag for her, though I was imagining all the people I’d met in Turgenev’s “Hunter’s Diary.”  But this night, I had her.  “Does Anna die?”  Eventually.  But not yet.  The fever breaks and it becomes clear that she will have to live through the mess she and Vronsky have created for themselves, for a while longer.

Friday, 01/04/19