Latest / The Data Shaman Podcast - Quant Mind, Shaman Soul / Season 3, Ep 5 - The ADHD Book Club: War and Peace

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Season 3, Ep 5 - The ADHD Book Club: War and Peace · The Data Shaman Podcast - Quant Mind, Shaman Soul

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you have ADHD, you probably have a pile of books you mean to read.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I know I have lots of them.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: And every one of them comes with a small dose of guild.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: My pile has been growing larger.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: For years I thought the problem was me.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Sitting alone in silence with 900 pages in a way of working built for someone else's brain.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I built one that fits mine.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: I turned the books into conversations.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Two imagined guests, Professor Clara Benedict, a literature scholar, and Dr.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Theo Marsh, a clinical psychologist, who talk a book through slowly.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: I remember a conversation far better than a page.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And this is my way of sharing them with you.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: I am Daniela Forni and this is the Letter Shaman Podcast.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: If the size of a book has ever kept you away from it, well, this one is for you.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Over a thousand pages, hundreds and hundreds of names, and a war in the middle.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: It has a reputation for being long and difficult.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: At least that's why that's how I hold it.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: But at its heart, it is a story of a handful of people trying to work out how to live.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Love, mistakes, war, growing up.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Today, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Let us begin.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_04: Part one.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Let me start by naming the elephant, or rather the very large Russian novel in the room.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Warren Peace is the book people use as a symbol of a book they'll never read.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's shorthand for impossibly long and difficult.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: I've gone my whole life slightly scared of it.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_03: And I want to take that fear apart in the first five minutes because it's almost entirely a misunderstanding.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_03: War and Peace is long, it's genuinely long, twelve or thirteen hundred pages, but it is not difficult.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_03: It's one of the most readable great novels ever written.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_03: If you can follow a family drama on television with a big ensemble cast and several storylines running at once, you can read War and Peace.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_03: It is for most of its length exactly that a sprawling, warm, gossipy, deeply absorbing story about a handful of families.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_03: Who's in love with whom, who's ruining the family fortune, who's at war, who's dying, who's being born.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: So the reputation is wrong.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: The reputation confuses big with hard.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: The sentences are clear, the emotions are universal.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_03: The reason it's long is simply that Tolstoy wanted to follow these people across 15 years of their lives and a national catastrophe, and watch them actually change slowly, the way people really change.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_03: The length isn't difficulty.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's time.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: He's giving you enough time with these people to watch them become different human beings.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: That's the whole experience.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a wonderful one.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Then uh give me the frame.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: What is it in a few sentences?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: When, where, who?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_03: It was written by Leo Tolstoy, a Russian aristocrat, and published at the end of the 1860s.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_03: But it's set earlier, roughly 1805 to 1812, during the Napoleonic Wars, when Napoleon's France was conquering its way across Europe and eventually invaded Russia.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_03: The war half of the title is that the campaigns, the battles, culminating in Napoleon's disastrous march on Moscow.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_03: The peace half is everything else, the drawing rooms and country estates and ballrooms of the Russian aristocracy, the families living their lives between and through the wars.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: The book braids the two together.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_03: A chapter of cannon fire, then a chapter of a young girl at her first dance.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: And the argument of the whole book is hidden in that braiding.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the title really is War and Peace.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: The two things set against each other.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_03: With one twist, I'll plant now and harvest later.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_03: By the end, you may feel that Tolstoy thinks peace, ordinary life, family, a baby, a shared meal, is the larger and truer of the two subjects, and that all the grand drama of war and history is in a sense the smaller thing pretending to be the big one.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_03: Hold that.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_03: It's the key to his whole view of life.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: How many people do I actually need to keep track of?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because I've heard horror stories about the names.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_03: Here's the honest answer.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_03: There are hundreds of named characters, but you only need to truly hold three and the families around them.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_03: If you anchor on three people, the whole book organizes itself around them like iron filings around magnets.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: So let me give you your three, and we'll build everything else on them.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_03: Part two Your Three People.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: The three are Pierre, Andre, and Natasha.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: Let me sketch each one as a person before we touch a single event, because once you know these three, you'll follow anything.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Go slowly.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the beginner.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_03: First, Pierre Bazukov.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_03: Picture a big, heavy, clumsy young man with spectacles, warm hearted, awkward in company, always a little lost.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: He's the illegitimate son of an enormously rich count.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_03: As the book opens, he has no clear place in the world, not quite accepted by society because of his birth, full of ideas and enthusiasms he can't organize, generous, gullible, searching.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_03: Pierre is the great seeker of the book.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: He spends the whole novel asking, in effect, one question How should a person live and what is it all for?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_03: He tries answer after answer.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_03: He's the soul of the book, and he's the one most like Tolstoy himself.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: The searcher.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Got him.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_03: Who's the second?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_03: Second, Prince Andre Bolkonski, Pierre's close friend and his near opposite in temperament.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_03: Andre is everything Pierre is not.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_03: Elegant, controlled, brilliant, proud, cold on the surface.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_03: Where Pierre bumbles, Andre is precise.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_03: As the book opens, Andre is bored and disillusioned with his shallow society life and his pretty chattering wife, and he's hungry for glory.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_03: He dreams of distinguishing himself in war, of being a great man, of his own Napoleon-like moment.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_03: Andre is the great thinker of the book, and also its great disappointed idealist.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_03: He keeps reaching for something pure and high, glory, then love, then a kind of spiritual peace, and keeps being disillusioned.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_03: If Pierre is the open heart, Andre is the clenched questing mind.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: The feeler and the thinker.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's already a rich pairing.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: I can feel the book is going to run those two temperaments against each other.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: It absolutely does, and that's deliberate.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_03: And third, the one who brings them both to life, Natasha Rostova.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_03: When we meet her, she's a girl of about 13, and she is the most purely alive character in the book.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_03: She runs, she laughs, she sings, she bursts into rooms.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_03: She feels everything at full volume with no filter between her heart and the world.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: She's not especially clever or beautiful in a conventional way.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_03: What she has is a kind of radiant vitality that makes everyone around her feel more alive.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: The whole book is, in a sense, about what happens to that life force as it grows up.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_03: How it gets wounded, how it nearly destroys her, how it matures.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_03: Both Andre and Pierre will love her, and she is the current of warmth that runs through the entire novel.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the architecture is almost like a solar system.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: Natasha is the warmth at the center, and the two men, the thinker and the feeler, orbit her and each other.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: That's a good way to see it, and each of them comes with a family, which you'll absorb painlessly as you read.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_03: Natasha's family, the Rostovs, are warm, loving, generous, and hopeless with money.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_03: They feel like life itself, a little chaotic, a little doomed, but full of affection.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_03: Andre's family, the Balkonskis, are austere and intense, a brilliant, tyrannical old father, and Andre's plain, devout, long-suffering sister, Princess Maria.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_03: And hovering at the edges, the Kuragans, a glamorous, cold, amoral family, the beautiful, hollow Helene, whom Pierre disastrously marries, and her equally beautiful, predatory brother, Anatole, who will nearly destroy Natasha.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_03: The Kuragans are the book's charming poison.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: The warm family, the severe family, and the beautiful toxic family.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Even that is a psychological map.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Three different emotional climates to grow up inside.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_03: And Tolstoy knows it.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_03: You can practically predict a character's fate from which families weather they were raised in.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_03: Now, with those three people and three families in hand, let's actually watch them live.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_03: We'll follow each of the three through the thing that tests the most.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: Start with Pierre, because his is the search that holds the whole book together.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: You said Pierre is the seeker.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: What's he actually searching for?
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: And why can't he find it?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_03: Let's watch it happen, because it's one of the great portraits of a certain kind of restless, meaning hungry person.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_03: Early in the book, Pierre's father dies, and against all expectation, Pierre, the awkward, illegitimate son, inherits the entire colossal fortune.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_03: Overnight he goes from being nobody to being one of the richest men in Russia, suddenly flattered, courted, surrounded.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that doesn't fix him.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_03: It makes him worse in a way, because now nothing external is stopping him, and he has no internal compass to steer by.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_03: The first thing that happens is that the scheming Currigan family maneuvers him into marrying the dazzling Helene, a woman of stunning beauty and complete emptiness, cold and sensual and faithless.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_03: Pierre, who confuses his physical attraction and his own passivity for love, drifts into the marriage almost without deciding to.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: And it's miserable almost immediately.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_03: He realizes he's bound himself for life to someone he doesn't respect and who doesn't love him.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Can I pause on how he gets into that marriage?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because you said it beautifully.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's a very specific and very common failure.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't actively choose the marriage.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: He just fails to resist a current that others are pushing him along.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then one day it's done, and he's trapped.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: That passivity, letting things happen to you and then calling it fate, is going to be Pierre's whole problem until nearly the end, isn't it?
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's precisely his problem, and you've named it better than most critics.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_03: Pierre is a man to whom things happen.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_03: He has enormous inner life and almost no agency.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_03: He's forever being carried by other people's wills, his wife's, his friends, societies.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_03: And here's the psychological engine of his whole journey.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_03: Because he can't find a center inside himself, he keeps looking for one outside, some system, some cause, some doctrine that will finally tell him how to live.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: So what does he reach for?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_03: One thing after another.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: After the disaster with Helene, he's in despair.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_03: There's a scene where he fights a duel, nearly kills a man, and is horrified at himself and at the meaninglessness of his whole existence.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_03: And in that low place, he's recruited into the Freemasons, at that time a semi-secret brotherhood with rituals and a philosophy of moral self-improvement.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_03: And Pierre throws himself into it completely.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_03: He believes he's finally found the answer.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_03: He resolves to become a better man, to reform, to do good.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_03: He even goes to his country estates determined to free and improve the lives of his serfs.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: And how does that go?
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_03: Poorly.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_03: And the way it fails is very telling.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_03: His grand schemes to help the peasants mostly fail because he's naive and his managers deceive him, and the peasants' lives aren't really improved.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_03: They just perform gratitude for the master.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: And slowly the Masonic enthusiasm curdles too.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_03: He starts to see vanity and politics inside the brotherhood.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_03: And Pierre deflates again, back into aimlessness, eating and drinking too much, drifting.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_03: He keeps inflating with a new conviction and then deflating when it fails to hold.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is such an accurate portrait of a particular kind of searcher, and I want to make the pattern explicit for the reader, because many people will recognize it, possibly in themselves.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Pierre keeps trying to solve the problem of meaning the way you'd solve a problem of knowledge, by finding the right system, the right doctrine, the right program.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: If I just adopt the correct framework, this philosophy, this cause, this discipline, then my life will finally make sense, and I'll know what to do.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it keeps not working.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: Because meaning isn't actually a puzzle you solve from the outside and then install.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: Each new system gives him a temporary high, the relief of certainty.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then reality wears the certainty away, and he crashes.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: Why doesn't it work?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: Say it the way you'd say it to a patient.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: Because he's trying to think his way to something that can only be lived into.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: He treats meaning as information he's missing, when it's really a relationship he hasn't entered.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: He wants a formula, a general answer to what is the meaning of life?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: And there isn't one.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the search for one is actually a very sophisticated form of avoidance.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: As long as Pierre is up in the realm of grand systems and universal answers, he never has to just be present, here, with this person, in this moment, doing this actual small good thing.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: The abstraction is a way of staying safely above his own life.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: And notice, all through this, the thing that's actually real and good in Pierre's life is right in front of him, and he can't see it.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: His genuine warmth, his real friendships, and eventually Natasha.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: The answer is at eye level, and he keeps looking at the sky.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_03: And Tolstoy is going to make him find it, but not through an idea, through catastrophe.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_03: It takes a firing squad and a filthy prison and a simple peasant to finally bring Pierre down out of the sky and into his own life.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_03: We'll get there.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_03: But I wanted you to feel the before, because the whole payoff depends on understanding how lost he is first.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_03: Rich, free, intelligent, kind, and utterly without a center.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: The man who has everything and no floor to stand on.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: I know that man.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: I've sat across from that man many times.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: Everyone has, including in the mirror.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_04: Andre.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_04: Part four.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_04: Andre and the Infinite Sky.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: You set Andre up as the proud one, the one who wants glory.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: Where does his story really begin?
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_03: It begins with a hunger that a lot of ambitious people will recognize.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_03: Andre is suffocating in his marriage, in the triviality of society, in the smallness of his life, and he is fixed on a cure, greatness.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_03: He's going to go to the war against Napoleon and distinguish himself, do something magnificent, become a hero.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_03: And here's the crucial detail.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_03: His private god is Napoleon himself.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: Andre half worships Napoleon as the model of the great man, the individual whose sheer will reshapes the world.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: Andre dreams of his own Toulon, his own breakthrough moment, after which everyone will know his name.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: So his search for meaning is the opposite of Pierre's.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: Pierre wants a system to submit to.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: Andre wants to rise above everyone, to be the exceptional one, the great man.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly opposite, yes.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_03: Pierre wants to dissolve into something larger, Andre wants to tower.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_03: And Tolstoy takes that ambition and in one of the most famous scenes in all of literature, simply dismantles it in a single moment.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_03: The Battle of Austerlitz, a catastrophic defeat for the Russians.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_03: In the chaos, at a desperate moment, Andre seizes a fallen flag and runs forward to rally the troops.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_03: His heroic moment, exactly the thing he's dreamed of.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_03: And almost immediately he's struck down, badly wounded, and falls on his back on the field.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: And he finds himself lying on his back, looking straight up into the sky.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_03: And the sky, Tolstoy describes it as lofty, infinite, with grey clouds drifting slowly across it.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_03: The sky simply overwhelms him.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_03: He's lying there, maybe dying, and he looks up at this vast, quiet, endless sky, and he thinks, How did I never see this sky before?
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_03: How did I never notice this infinite peaceful height above everything?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: And in the light of that sky, all his ambition, the glory, the heroism, Napoleon, his own name, suddenly looks tiny and meaningless, petty, a child's game.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_03: There's this enormous, silent truth above him that he'd been completely blind to while he was scrambling for medals.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: That is I want to be careful not to be glib, but that is a near-death ego dissolution experience described with total precision.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: Something I see echoes of in people who've had cardiac arrests, serious accidents, certain profound experiences.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: The ordinary scaffolding of the self, the ambitions, the status games, the what will people think of me, it suddenly drops away.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: And what's left is this overwhelming encounter with something vast and impersonal.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: And in the light of that, the ego's concerns look absurd.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: People come back from it changed.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: The striving self is revealed for a moment as a kind of small frantic noise against an immense silence.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_03: And Tolstoy caps it perfectly.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_03: As Andre lies there, her should ride across the battlefield but Napoleon himself, Andre's hero, the great man surveying his victory.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: Napoleon even stops near Andre and says something admiring about the fallen soldiers.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_03: And Andre, who has worshipped this man, looks at him and feels nothing.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_03: Napoleon up close against that infinite sky seems small, vain, insignificant.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: The idol simply evaporates.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_03: The greatest man in the world is revealed from the vantage point of a dying man looking at the sky to be a little figure fussing over a battlefield that the sky doesn't even notice.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: The deflation of the great man.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the same deflation the whole book is going to perform on a larger scale.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: Tolstoy versus the idea that great men drive history.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: Andre's private disillusionment at Austerlitz is a seed of Tolstoy's entire philosophy.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_03: You're exactly right, and we'll open that out later, but stay with Andre as a person, because his story has a cruelty in it.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_03: He survives, he comes home, and arrives just as his wife is dying in childbirth.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_03: The baby lives, the wife, the pretty, shallow little wife he'd been so cold to and so bored by, dies.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_03: And dies with an expression on her face that Andre reads as what have you done to me?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_03: And it breaks something in him.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_03: He's left with guilt he can never discharge because the person he wronged is gone.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_03: He retreats to his estate, withdraws from the world, and sinks into a quiet, frozen despair.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_03: He decides essentially that he's done, that he'll live for his son and his father, and expect nothing more from life.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_03: He's only thirty ish, and he's decided life is over.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's a very recognizable depressive turn.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it's subtler than the Austerlitz drama.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: The sky gave him a glimpse of something beyond ego.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: But he can't live there.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: You can't stay on your back on a battlefield.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: He has to get up and walk back into ordinary time.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: And in ordinary time, he's a guilt-ridden widower who's lost his faith in the one thing, glory, that used to organize his life, and found nothing to replace it.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: So he does what disillusioned people often do.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: He armors himself in a cold, superior resignation.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: I expect nothing, so nothing can disappoint me.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: It looks like wisdom.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually a defense against more pain.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_03: And then the book sends him Natasha, which is where our three finally collide.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_04: An interlude Princess Maria and the Daughter Who Wasn't Allowed a Self.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: You keep mentioning Andre's sister, Princess Maria, the plain devout one tyrannized by the father.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: I want to hear about her, because tyrannical father and dutiful daughter is one of the oldest and most damaging patterns there is.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd like to know whether Tolstoy sees it clearly more just sentimentalizes it.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_03: He sees it with almost painful clarity, and Maria is, for a lot of readers, the most quietly heartbreaking person in the book.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_03: Here's her situation.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_03: The old Prince Bolkansky, Andrei and Maria's father, is a brilliant, iron-willed, domineering man who has retired to his country estate and rules it like a tiny kingdom.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_03: He keeps a rigid schedule, he's sarcastic and cutting, he terrifies the servants, and he has fastened himself onto his unmarried daughter, Maria, as the object of his control.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_03: He oversees her education, mocks her, keeps her isolated on the estate with almost no company, flies into cruel rages at her, and at the same time genuinely, desperately loves her and cannot bear the thought of her leaving him.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_03: And Maria, who is deeply religious and achingly good, responds to all of it with patience, self-blame, and devotion.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_03: She tells herself that her suffering is her cross to bear, that she must not resent him, that any flicker of anger in her is a sin she must pray away.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: That is a textbook portrait, and a devastating one, of what growing up under a controlling parent does to a person's sense of self, especially when the control is braided together with real love, which is the cruelest version.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: Let me lay out what I see happening in her, because readers may recognize it from their own lives.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: First, she's been trained to believe her own needs and feelings don't count.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: That wanting things for herself is selfish.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: So she's lost access to her own desires.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: She barely knows what she wants because wanting was never allowed.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: Second, because the person hurting her is also the person she loves and depends on, she can't let herself be angry at him.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: The anger would be too dangerous, too disloyal.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: So she turns it inward and becomes angry at herself instead.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's where the constant self-blame and the religious self-punishment come from.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: She converts a forbidden resentment of her father into a permitted contempt for herself.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_03: And Tolstoy shows you the cost of it in the most unbearable way at the father's death.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_03: Finally says the loving things he withheld her whole life.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_03: And when he dies, Maria is, of course, grief stricken.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: But Tolstoy does something very brave.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_03: He lets her also feel underneath the grief a flicker of something else relief.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_03: A terrible, shameful sense that a weight has lifted, that she's free.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_03: And the moment she notices that feeling in herself, she's horrified and crushed by guilt.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_03: What kind of monster feels relief at her own father's death?
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer, which Tolstoy understands and most of her era wouldn't have, is a completely normal one.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: That relief is not monstrous, it's the most human thing in the world.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: When you've been held in a cage by someone, even someone you love, part of you will feel the door open when they're gone.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that part isn't evil, it's just a prisoner noticing the lock is off.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: The tragedy of Maria is that she's been so thoroughly trained to distrust her own inner life that she experiences a normal, healthy flicker of relief as proof of her own wickedness.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: She can't even be freed without punishing herself for it.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's how deep the damage goes.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: The cage became internal.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: She carries it with her even after the man who built it is dead.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_03: And then Tolstoy, who is merciful to her, gives her the thing she never believed she deserved.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_03: He sends her Nikolai.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: Right at her lowest moment, her father just dead, the French closing in, the estate's peasants in near revolt and refusing to let her leave, Nikolai Rostov, Natasha's soldier brother, happens to ride onto the estate, takes command, faces down the rebellious peasants, and gets her to safety.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_03: And he sees in this plain, frightened, grief-stricken woman something luminous, her goodness, the depth in her eyes.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_03: And she sees in this decisive, kind young man the rescue she'd never let herself even wish for.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_03: And they will eventually marry.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's gentler and more plausible than that, I think, because Tolstoy makes the point that Maria's goodness was real, not just damage, that the self-abnegating girl genuinely did develop a deep, rich spiritual interior, and that what she needed wasn't to be fixed, but to be released into a life where that interior could finally be met and loved rather than exploited.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_03: Nikolai isn't a therapist, he's a decent man who gives her a safe place to become herself.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_03: And in the epilogue, you see that it worked, that Maria finally loved without being controlled, becomes warm, settled, even quietly authoritative in her own home, a wonderful mother.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_03: The cage does open in the end.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_03: It just took the tyrant's death and someone safe to walk into the opened door.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: So she's the counterweight to Natasha in a way.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: Natasha grew up with too little damn between her depths and the surface.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: Maria grew up with far too much, walled in, herself suppressed almost to nothing.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: And both of them have to find their way to a middle place where the real self can live safely in the world.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: Different wounds, same destination.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_03: That's beautifully put.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_03: And it's why Tolstoy spends so much time on both women.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_03: He's showing you two opposite ways a young woman's inner life can be deformed by the family she's raised in.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: The open floodgate and the sealed wall.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_03: And then, patiently, showing you both of them finding their way to something whole.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_03: Now, Natasha and the Fall.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: Part five Natasha Aliveness and the Fall The Frozen Man and the Girl Whose Pure Life?
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: I can see the collision coming.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's beautifully set up.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_03: There's a scene, Andre in his gray resignation, is staying overnight at the Rostov's country estate, and at night he can't sleep, and he overhears Natasha at the window above him, unable to sleep herself because the night is so beautiful, so excited about the moonlight that she's almost leaning out into the air, full of this uncontainable joy at simply being alive.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_03: And Andre, lying in the dark, listening to this girl intoxicated by moonlight, feels something stir in him that he thought was dead.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_03: There's a famous image a little later.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_03: Andre sees an old, gnarled oak tree, bare and dead looking, and feels kinship with it.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, that's right, life is over.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_03: No more springs.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_03: And then, weeks later, he passes the same oak and it is burst into full green leaf, and something in him answers it.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_03: No, life is not over.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_03: Natasha is his spring.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: So she thaws him.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_03: She thaws him.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_03: He comes back into life, re-enters society, and eventually he and Natasha fall in love and become engaged.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_03: And for a moment it's radiant.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_03: The disillusioned man and the life-giving girl.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: Before the tragedy turns, you keep calling Natasha pure life.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: Almost as if she's shallow, a happy bubble.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: Is she?
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because a bubble isn't very interesting to lose.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_03: She's the opposite of shallow, and there's one scene I have to give you because it's where Tolstoy shows you the depth under the sparkle, and it's pure psychology.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_03: Midway through the book, there's a long, glorious sequence where Natasha and her brother Nikolai go out hunting in the autumn countryside with their rough old relative they simply call Uncle, a nobleman who's gone half peasant, who lives simply out on his land.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_03: After the hunt, they all crowd into Uncle's little house.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_03: An uncle takes down a balalaika, a folk instrument, and starts to play Russian folk music, and a servant woman sings.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_03: And Natasha.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_03: Natasha, this girl raised by a French emigre governess, dressed in French fashions, taught French dances and French manners, trained from birth in an aristocracy that spoke French at dinner and looked down on peasant Russia as something coarse.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_03: This girl stands up and without being taught, without ever having learned it, she dances.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_03: A Russian folk dance.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_03: The exact steps, the exact spirit, the precise movements of the shoulders and the way of holding a handkerchief, as if she'd been doing it her whole life.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_03: And everyone watching is amazed.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_03: Where, Tolstoy asks, where did this little countess, raised entirely on French culture, get this?
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_03: How does she know in her body, the soul of a Russian peasant woman she's supposedly nothing like?
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's a wonderful image, and I know exactly why it moves me.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: Tolstoy is dramatizing the difference between the acquired self and the deep self.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: Everything on Natasha's surface, the language, the manners, the fashions, is learned, installed, a layer of culture laid over her by her upbringing.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: And underneath that layer, there's something she never learned and could never have been taught, something that comes up from far below, from her blood, her land, her belonging to a whole people and a whole history.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: And in the right moment, with the right music, the deep self simply surges up through the acquired self and takes over her body.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: The French finishing school persona dissolves and the real thing dances.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_03: And why does Tolstoy give this to Natasha specifically, do you think?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's the same trait that will save her and nearly destroy her, now shown at its most beautiful.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: Her defining gift is that the channel between her depths and her surface is wide open.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: Most of us are damned up.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: Our acquired, careful, social self sits on top and keeps the deep stuff down.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: Natasha has almost no damn.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: What's in her comes straight out, the joy, the folk dance, the authenticity that makes everyone around her feel more real.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's why she's so alive and so lovable.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: But it's also precisely why, when loneliness and longing and a predator's flattery flood her later, that too will come straight up and out, with no damn to stop it.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: The openness that lets the Russian soul dance is the same openness that will let Anatole in.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: Tolstoy shows you the glory of the trait here, at Uncle's, so that when the same trait becomes a catastrophe, you understand it's not a different Natasha.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same gift, unprotected.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's exactly it.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_03: The dance and the fall come from one source.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_03: And that's the deepest kind of characterization there is, where a person's finest quality and their gravest danger turn out to be a single thing seen in two lights.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_03: Hold the dance in your mind because it's the Natasha the whole book wants you to love, and it's what's at stake when the machinery of tragedy starts to turn.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Which it now does.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_03: Which it now does.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_03: Andre's harsh old father disapproves and imposes a condition.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_03: They must wait a year before marrying, and during that year, Andre goes abroad.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_03: So Natasha, seventeen, bursting with feeling, deeply in love, is left behind to wait.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_03: Alone for a year.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh no, you don't leave that temperament alone and unoccupied for a year.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_03: And that's exactly Tolstoy's psychological insight.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_03: What is Natasha's great gift?
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_03: Aliveness, immediacy.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_03: She lives entirely in the now, feeling everything at full intensity.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_03: That's glorious when it's joy.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_03: But the very same trait that she lives in the present and feels overwhelmingly makes her terribly vulnerable to exactly what happens next.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_03: Because into that year of lonely, pent up, waiting feeling, walks Anatole Karaghan, Helene's brother, beautiful, charming, utterly amoral, a practiced seducer.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_03: And he sets out to seduce Natasha, flattering her, overwhelming her, creating a sense of secret urgency.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_03: And Natasha, starved of Andre, young, all feeling and no armor, falls for it catastrophically.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_03: She convinces herself she's madly in love with Anatole, agrees to elope with him, and nearly throws away everything, her engagement, her honor, her future in a matter of days.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: Let me slow this down because what you're describing is a very precise anatomy of how a good person gets swept into a disastrous decision.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it's worth making explicit.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: Several things stack up at once.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: First, she's isolated, cut off from the person she's committed to, left in a vacuum of longing.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: Second, she's flooded with feeling and has no outlet for it.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: Third, Anatole supplies intense flattery and attention, exactly calibrated to that hunger.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: Fourth, and this is the seducer's key tool, he manufactures urgency and secrecy.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: It has to be now, it has to be hidden, don't think, don't tell anyone, don't consult the people who love you.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: And urgency plus secrecy is precisely the combination that disables judgment.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: The moment someone says, you must decide right now and don't tell anyone who cares about you, that is the signature of manipulation, whether it's a seduction or a scam or a cult.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: And notice, and this matters enormously for how we judge Natasha, that she isn't stupid and she isn't bad.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_03: She's overwhelmed.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_03: That's the crucial point.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it connects straight back to what we were discussing with the other book, oddly.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: This is the intimate one-on-one version of how Ahab captured a whole crew on the quarter deck.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: Isolate the person, flood them with intense emotion, supply a compelling object for that emotion, and impose urgency so judgment can't catch up.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: It works on a crew of thirty, and it works on one 17-year-old girl at a window.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: Natasha's fall isn't a moral failure of a weak character.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's what happens when a powerfully feeling, present-focused person in a state of deprivation meets a skilled predator.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: Almost anyone with her temperament in her exact situation is at risk.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's not an excuse.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: The harm is real.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: The betrayal of Andre is real, but it's an explanation.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the difference between judging and understanding is the whole difference between how most people read this episode and how Tolstoy wrote it.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_03: Tolstoy writes it with immense compassion.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_03: The elopement is foiled at the last minute.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_03: It turns out in a final sordid detail that Anatole is already secretly married and could never have married her anyway.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_03: He was simply going to ruin her.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_03: Natasha is shattered by shame, by the collapse of her engagement, by the realization of what she nearly did and what she's thrown away.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_03: Andre, when he learns of it, is proud and cold and cannot forgive her.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_03: The engagement is over.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_03: Natasha falls into a deep depression, even tries to poison herself, and comes very close to being destroyed by guilt.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_03: The radiant girl of the moonlight is for a long stretch extinguished.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: And does she come back?
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because this is the hinge for her whole life.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: Whether this becomes the wound that defines her or a wound she grows through.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_03: She comes back, but and this is Tolstoy's realism, not quickly and not by being told she's forgiven.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_03: She comes back slowly, through time, through the care of her family, through religion for a while, and ultimately through being needed by others in the catastrophe that's about to engulf everyone, the War of 1812.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_03: When the whole country is thrown into crisis, Natasha finds herself nursing wounded soldiers, and in caring for others, in being useful in a real and urgent way, the life starts to flow back into her.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_03: Her recovery doesn't come from resolving her guilt intellectually.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_03: It comes from being pulled out of herself, back into love and service and the needs of other people.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's deeply true to how people actually heal from shame, and it's worth underlining.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: You don't usually think your way out of shame.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: Shame is the feeling that you were bad, rotten at the core, and you can't argue yourself out of that.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's not a belief, it's a felt sense of your own worthlessness.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: What dissolves it is reconnection, being allowed back into the circle of love and usefulness, being needed, doing something good for someone and having it received.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: Natasha doesn't recover by being convinced she's forgiven.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: She recovers by being let back in, and by turning her overwhelming capacity for feeling outward toward people who need her.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: Her gift, all that aliveness, stops being a danger to her and becomes a source of care.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's maturation.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: The same engine, pointed in a wiser direction.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the people she'll nurse, in a coincidence that is almost unbearable, is Andrei himself, mortally wounded, brought by chance into the care of the fleeing Rostov family.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_03: The man she betrayed and the girl who betrayed him, brought back together at his deathbed.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_03: But to understand that, we have to let the war come.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_03: Because in 1812, the whole private world of these people is swallowed by history, and that's where Tolstoy's biggest idea lives.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_04: Part 6 1812 and the Lie of the Great Man.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: So Napoleon invades Russia.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me what that means for our families, and tell me the big idea you keep promising.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_03: In 1812, Napoleon marches an enormous army into Russia and heads for Moscow.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_03: And the Russians, rather than meeting him in one grand decisive battle and losing, keep retreating, drawing him deeper and deeper into the vast country as the summer turns toward the terrible Russian winter.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_03: There's one gigantic, horrifically bloody battle, Borodino, which settles nothing cleanly.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_03: Both sides are devastated.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_03: And then the Russians do something that shocks all of Europe.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_03: They abandon Moscow.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_03: They let Napoleon march into the ancient capital and find it nearly empty and then burning.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_03: And Napoleon sits in the ashes of a deserted city with winter coming and his supply lines stretched to breaking, and realizes he's won nothing and has to retreat.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_03: And the retreat through the Russian winter with no food, harassed the whole way, destroys his army almost completely.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_03: He came in with a vast force and crawled out with a fraction of it.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_03: It's one of history's great catastrophes.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: And where are our people in this?
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_03: Everywhere in it.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_03: Andre is a commander and is mortally wounded at Borodino.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_03: Pierre, in one of the book's strangest and most wonderful sequences, is a civilian, a rich, eccentric who wanders onto the battlefield at Borodino out of a vague desire to witness it, in a green coat and a white hat, absurdly out of place amid the slaughter.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_03: The Rostovs flee Moscow as the French approach, giving up their carts, which they'd loaded with their possessions, to carry wounded soldiers instead.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_03: And Pierre, half deranged by the grandeur and horror of events, conceives a wild plan to stay in burning Moscow and assassinate Napoleon himself, and instead get swept up and taken prisoner by the French.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_03: All their private lives get caught in the gears of this enormous public catastrophe.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: Now the big idea.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_03: Here it is, and it's the thing people argue about most.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_03: Tolstoy periodically stops the story and addresses you directly, the reader, in essay-like passages to hammer one claim, the great man theory of history is a lie.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_03: The idea that Napoleon or any general or any king causes history, that these great individuals bend events to their will, Tolstoy says this is an illusion, almost a superstition.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_03: He argues that history is actually the sum of millions upon millions of individual human actions, each person pursuing their own small aims, and that the result that emerges from all of it is something no one chose and no one controls.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_03: Napoleon thinks he's directing the battle of Borodino, but Tolstoy shows you that once the battle starts, Napoleon's orders arrive too late or are impossible or are ignored, or events have already moved past them.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_03: The battle is actually being decided by the courage or panic of thousands of individual men in the smoke, none of whom Napoleon can see or control.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_03: The great man is a figurehead who takes credit afterward for a wave he merely rode.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: I find this genuinely profound.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to translate it into psychological terms, because I think that's what it really is.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: Tolstoy is describing the illusion of control, one of the most robust and important findings about the human mind.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_01: We systematically powerfully overestimate how much we and especially leaders control outcomes.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: We crave a world where events are caused by the intentions of powerful agents, because such a world feels comprehensible and in a strange way safe.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_01: If great men cause things, then things have reasons and someone is at the wheel.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: The alternative, that enormous events emerge from uncountable small causes and no one is actually steering, is far more true and far more frightening.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: So we tell ourselves stories afterward, clean stories with heroes and villains and decisive choices, and we edit out the chaos and the luck.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: Tolstoy is attacking the hero narrative, not just as bad history, but as a comforting fiction the mind manufactures to avoid facing how little anyone is in charge.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_03: And he gives you the human embodiment of the two attitudes, which is where it stops being an essay and becomes psychology, you can feel.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_03: On one side, Napoleon, the man utterly convinced of his own agency, certain that his genius and will are shaping the world, vain, self-regarding, forever posing for history.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_03: On the other side, the Russian commander Kutuzov, old, fat, one-eyed, sleepy, often seeming to do nothing.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_03: Kutuzov doesn't try to impose a brilliant plan on the battle.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_03: He seems to listen to events, to sense the deeper current of what the army and the country are doing, and to mostly stay out of the way of it.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_03: To let Napoleon destroy himself in the Russian vastness, rather than to defeat him with a clever stroke.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_03: Tolstoy clearly thinks Kutuzov is the wiser man, precisely because Kutuzov doesn't believe in his own control.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_03: Kutuzov's wisdom is a kind of humble, patient attunement.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_03: Napoleon's genius is a delusion that happens to have worked until it met something bigger than itself.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: That contrast is almost a clinical teaching about two relationships to life.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: Napoleon is the illusion of control at its most inflated.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: Grandiosity, really, the belief that a sufficiently great will can command reality.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: Kutusov is something much harder and much healthier, the capacity to accept the limits of your control, to work with the current of events rather than against it, to tolerate the anxiety of not controlling and not rushing to a false, decisive action just to feel powerful.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: In a person's own life, the Napoleon stance looks like exhausting, white-knuckled attempts to force outcomes, and it tends to shatter when life refuses to obey.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_01: The Kutusov stance looks like roughly acceptance, doing what's yours to do and letting go of what was never yours to command.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: Tolstoy is saying the Kutusov stance isn't passivity or weakness, it's the deepest form of strength, because it's aligned with how reality actually works.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_03: And here's the quiet thing Tolstoy does.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_03: That same lesson, stop trying to control and force meaning, start accepting and attuning, is exactly the lesson Pierre, our seeker, has to learn in his own soul.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_03: The philosophy of history and the story of Pierre are the same idea at two scales.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_03: Pierre spends the whole book being a tiny Napoleon of meaning, trying to seize the answer by force of intellect and will, system after system.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_03: And he's about to learn the Kutuzov lesson the hardest possible way, in a prison camp from a peasant.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_04: Part seven Pierre in prison and the roundness of Platon Karatayev.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: This is the part you've been promising.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: Pierre taken prisoner.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: Walk me through it.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_03: Pierre, captured in burning Moscow, is held by the French.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_03: And early in his captivity, he's forced to witness something that nearly annihilates him.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_03: The French execute a group of prisoners accused of arson by firing squad, and Pierre is lined up with them, fully expecting to die.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_03: And then at the last moment, for no reason he can understand, he's pulled aside and spared, while men beside him are shot dead in front of him.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_03: He watches the whole mechanical, bureaucratic horror of it.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_03: Ordinary French soldiers, not monsters, carrying out these killings with sick, pale faces, as if they too are caught in a machine none of them chose.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's a profound trauma.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_01: A mock execution, essentially.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: Witnessing others die in your place?
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_01: People are shattered by far less.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_03: What does it do to him?
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_03: It does something paradoxical, and this is the heart of the book.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_03: It destroys something in Pierre, and the thing it destroys turns out to be the thing that was imprisoning him.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_03: He says afterward that in that moment his faith in the good order of the world, in providence, in all his systems and philosophies was killed.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_03: Everything he'd been using to make sense of life collapsed.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_03: He's left in the prison camp with nothing, no fortune, no status, no freedom, no intellectual framework, cold, hungry, lice ridden, reduced to the barest animal existence.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where he finds peace.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_01: Of course it is.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_01: Go on.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think I know the shape of this, but I want to hear it.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_03: In the prison camp, Pierre meets a simple peasant soldier named Platon Karataev.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_03: And Karataev becomes the most important person in Pierre's life.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_03: Not through anything he teaches, because he teaches nothing really.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_03: Karateev is simply a certain way of being.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_03: Tolstoy describes him as round.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_03: Everything about him is round, soft, complete, whole.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_03: He accepts everything that happens to him without complaint or resistance, hunger, cold, captivity, and eventually his own death, with a kind of serene, unselfconscious ease.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_03: He lives entirely in the present moment.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_03: He's endlessly kind in small, immediate ways, sharing his food, sewing a shirt, telling folk stories and proverbs.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_03: He doesn't worry, he doesn't strive, he doesn't ask what it all means.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_03: He just is fully, warmly, in each moment, part of the whole of life, like a drop in a river, and he loves whatever is in front of him.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: Let me try to say what Karateev does for Pierre psychologically, because I think it's the key that unlocks the entire novel.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a genuinely great insight about meaning and suffering.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_03: Please, this is the summit of the book.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_01: For the entire novel, Pierre has been asking what is the meaning of life?
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: As a question to be answered, a problem to solve with his intellect, the right system to find and install.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: And he's been miserable because no answer holds.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_01: Karateev doesn't answer the question.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: Karateev dissolves it by simply living in a way that doesn't need the question answered.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_01: He shows Pierre, not by argument, but by example, that meaning isn't something you figure out and then live by.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_01: Meaning is something that's present in the act of living itself.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_01: When you stop standing outside your life interrogating it, and simply enter it, this meal, this cold, this other person, this moment, accepted and loved.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_01: Pierre had everything and found no meaning, because he was looking for it in the wrong place and in the wrong form.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_01: Karateev has nothing.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_01: He's a prisoner who will soon be shot, and he's saturated with meaning.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because for him, meaning isn't a conclusion, it's a relationship to the present that asks nothing from the future and nothing from the mind.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_03: And so Pierre, stripped of everything, and I mean the inheritance, the status, the freedom, all of it gone, is for the first time in the whole book happy.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_01: Which is the great paradox, and Tolstoy earns it rather than just asserting it.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_01: Pierre is free in prison.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_01: He discovers that almost everything he thought he needed he didn't need, that a man can be deprived of nearly everything and still have the essential thing, which was available to him the whole time and which he kept overlooking while he was rich and free.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: There's a modern echo I can't resist naming.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_01: A psychiatrist named Viktor Frankel, who survived the Nazi concentration camps, wrote that even in that ultimate deprivation, the one freedom that could never be taken was the freedom to choose your inner stance toward your suffering.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that meaning is found not by asking life what it means, but by responding to what life asks of you, moment to moment.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's almost exactly Pierre's discovery, and Karatayev is almost exactly Frankel's insight given a human face.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_01: Tolstoy got there most of a century earlier, through a round peasant in a prison camp.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_03: And Tolstoy is too honest to make it sentimental.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_03: Karatayev, weakened by illness on the brutal, forced march of the retreating prisoners, falls behind.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_03: And the French simply shoot him, the way they shoot any prisoner who can't keep up.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_03: And Pierre, by then, has absorbed enough of Karatayev's spirit that he doesn't even let himself fully look.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_03: He's learned a kind of acceptance even of this.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_03: It's not a tidy, comforting death.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_03: The wise man is shot by the roadside like a lame animal.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_03: But what he was has already passed into Pierre and changed him permanently.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_01: So Pierre is finally rebuilt, not by adding the right idea, but by being reduced to nothing and discovering what was underneath all the ideas the whole time.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_03: Reduced to nothing, and finding that nothing was actually the floor he'd been looking for.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_03: He's eventually freed when the Russians overtake the retreating French, and he comes back into the world a transformed man, quieter, warmer, no longer frantically seeking, able at last to simply live and to love.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_03: And the person he's now ready to truly love, now that he's stopped grasping, is Natasha.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_04: Part eight.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_04: Andre's death, Natasha's grief, and coming back to life.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_01: You said earlier that Natasha ends up nursing the dying Andre.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_01: I need to know how that lands.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_03: As the Rostovs flee Moscow, By pure chance, one of the wounded officers they're carrying in their convoy turns out to be Andre, mortally wounded at Borodino, not expected to live.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_03: And Natasha discovers he's there, and she goes to him.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_03: The girl who betrayed him, who he could not forgive, who has carried that guilt like a stone, she comes to his side and she nurses him and she asks his forgiveness.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_03: And he gives it, not grudgingly, completely.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_03: Because by now Andre is dying.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_03: And dying has done to him something like what it did at Austerlitz, under the sky, only final.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me about his death, because you've set up Andre all along as the thinker who keeps reaching for something beyond the ego and never quite being able to live there.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_01: Does he get there at the end?
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_03: He does.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_03: And it's one of the most delicate things Tolstoy ever wrote.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_03: And also, I'll be honest with you, one of the most unsettling, because it cuts two ways.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_03: As Andre dies over days, he undergoes a transformation.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_03: He lets go of his pride, his bitterness, his striving.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_03: He arrives at a state of vast, impersonal, all-embracing love.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_03: He feels he loves everyone, even his enemies, even Anatol, the man who wronged him and Natasha, whom he sees dying in the same hospital.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_03: He reaches the spiritual height he'd glimpsed under the sky at Austerlitz, a love that has let go of the self entirely.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_03: But Tolstoy shows you that this height has a shadow.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_03: Because to love everyone equally and impersonally, Andre has to let go of loving Natasha in the particular, fierce, human way she needs to be loved.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_03: The closer he comes to that universal egoless love, the further he drifts from life, from this woman in front of him who is desperate for him to stay.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_03: His transcendence and his dying are the same movement.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_03: He's not reaching enlightenment and then living in it, he's loosening his grip on life itself.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_03: And the universal love is what that loosening feels like from the inside.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_03: He gets his peace by leaving.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_03: Natasha feels it that even as he forgives her and loves her, he's already becoming something that isn't hers anymore, that isn't quite human anymore.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_03: And then he dies.
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's extraordinarily subtle, and much truer than the usual deathbed wisdom scene.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_01: Tolstoy is refusing an easy consolation.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_01: He's saying, yes, there's a serene, selfless, all forgiving love that people sometimes reach at the end, but don't mistake it for the goal of living.
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_01: That love may be the right relationship to dying, but the right relationship to living is messier, more particular, more attached.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_01: You're supposed to love this person fiercely and unequally, to be bound to the world, to care who lives and dies.
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_01: Andre's final piece is genuine, but it's the piece of someone letting go of life.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the book quietly insists that the living shouldn't be in a hurry to get there.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_01: The task of the living is to stay attached.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_03: And that's exactly the baton the book hands to Natasha and Pierre.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_03: The task of the living.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_03: Because the war takes one more terrible thing from Natasha.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_03: Her youngest brother, Petja, a sweet, eager boy who rides off to the fighting full of romantic excitement, and is killed pointlessly in a minor skirmish almost as soon as he arrives.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_03: And the news of Petya's death nearly kills the family's mother.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Not by resolving it internally in solitude, but by being summoned back into connection and usefulness by someone who needs them.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_01: Grief turned inward becomes a tomb.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_01: Grief interrupted by someone else's greater need becomes a door back to the living.
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_01: Natasha heals both times she's broken by the same mechanism.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_01: Love called out of her by another person's need.
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_03: And out of all this shared catastrophe, Andre dead, Petya dead, the war survived, everyone stripped down to what matters.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_03: Pierre and Natasha find each other.
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_03: Both of them have been through the fire, both have been reduced to essentials.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_03: Pierre has stopped grasping, Natasha has been deepened by suffering.
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_03: And they recognize in each other, quietly, the person they can actually build a life with.
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_03: The seeker and the life force, both matured by loss, come to rest together.
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_04: Part nine.
• 1:12:15
  SPEAKER_01: So it ends with a wedding and happily ever after?
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_01: That feels too neat for everything you've described.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_03: It ends with something far stranger and more interesting than happily ever after.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_03: And it's the most divisive part of the whole book.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_03: Some readers find it the most beautiful thing in literature, and some find it almost a betrayal.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_03: The main story closes, and then Tolstoy jumps ahead about seven years and shows you these people in settled domestic life.
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_03: Pierre and Natasha are married with children.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_03: Nikolai, Natasha's brother, has married Andre's devout sister, Princess Maria.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_03: The two austere, dutiful ones find each other.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_03: And they run an estate and raise children.
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_03: And Tolstoy shows us all of this in loving, deliberately unglamorous detail.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_02: How unglamorous.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_02: This is the part that shocks people.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_03: Natasha, our radiant, singing, moonlit girl, the most alive creature in the book, has become a somewhat stout, careworn, frumpy mother, entirely absorbed in her husband and children, and diapers and feeding schedules and jealousies, no longer singing, no longer sparkling, indifferent to how she looks, fiercely focused on her family and nothing else.
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_03: Tolstoy describes it almost provocatively.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_03: The glittering girl has become a slightly dowdy hen of a mother.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_02: And he presents this, and here's the scandal, not as a tragedy, not as the death of her spirit, but as its fulfillment, as what all that life force was for.
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_01: I can see exactly why that divides readers.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think both reactions are catching something real.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_01: On one reading, it's deflating, even a little disturbing.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_01: You spend a thousand pages falling in love with Natasha's untamable vitality, and then it gets apparently domesticated into child rearing and lost.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_01: On the other reading, and I think this is Tolstoy's, it's the book's final and most radical argument about where meaning actually lives.
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_01: He spent the whole novel deflating the big things.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_01: Glory is vanity.
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_01: The great man is a fraud.
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Grand systems of meaning crumble.
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_01: Romantic passion nearly destroys people.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_01: War is chaos no one controls.
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_01: And here, at the end, he elevates the small thing, ordinary family love, the daily, unglamorous, unheroic work of raising children and tending a marriage, and says, This actually is the big thing.
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is where life is really happening.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_01: All the war and philosophy and passion were the noise.
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_01: This quiet is the signal.
• 1:15:40
  SPEAKER_03: That's exactly his wager.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_03: Remember what I told you to hold at the very start that by the end you might feel Tolstoy thinks peace is the larger subject than war?
• 1:15:52
  SPEAKER_03: This is where it pays off.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_03: The whole architecture of the book, alternating the thunder of history with the small domestic scenes, was building to the claim that the domestic scenes were the real history all along, the actual substance of human life.
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_03: And the battles were the froth on top.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_03: Napoleon thought he was making history.
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_03: Tolstoy thinks a mother nursing her baby is closer to the true current of life than Napoleon ever got.
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it connects straight back to Pierre's prison camp lesson, doesn't it?
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_01: Pierre learned from Karadeev that meaning isn't a grand answer you seize, but a presence you enter in the ordinary moment through acceptance and love.
• 1:16:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the epilogue is simply that lesson lived out at scale over years.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_01: A life that has stopped seeking the extraordinary and has found that the ordinary, fully entered and fully loved, was the thing it was seeking.
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_01: Natasha absorbed in her children isn't Natasha's vitality dying, it's her vitality finally landing, pouring into something real and present, instead of flaring into the air.
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_03: And he ends the novel on the next generation, on Andre's young son, now a dreamy adolescent, idolizing Pierre and burning with his own vague dreams of future greatness and glory.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_03: Which is to say the whole cycle of seeking and disillusionment is simply going to begin again in a new young soul, as it always does and always will.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's the honest ending then.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_01: Not they solved life, but they found, for now, a way to live.
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_01: And life goes on, and the next person will have to find their own way, and we'll probably start by making the same beautiful mistakes.
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's not a failure of resolution.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's wisdom about the fact that there is no final resolution.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_01: There's only each generation learning the hard way, what can't really be taught.
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_03: And then, famously, Tolstoy appends a whole second essay at the very end, returning to his theory of history and free will, arguing it out in philosophical terms, which most readers find heavygoing, and which you can absolutely skim or skip on a first reading without missing the novel.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_03: The novel's argument about free will is already fully alive in the characters.
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_03: You don't need the lecture.
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_03: You felt it in Pierre's journey from grasping to acceptance, in Kutuzov's wisdom, in the way every character is both driven by forces they didn't choose, and somehow within that responsible for who they become.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_04: Part ten.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_04: So what is it really about?
• 1:19:34
  SPEAKER_04: A psychologist's summary.
• 1:19:37
  SPEAKER_01: Let me gather it up the way I did with the whale book.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you keep me honest.
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_03: Go ahead.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_03: I'll catch you if you fall.
• 1:19:48
  SPEAKER_01: At its center, War and Peace is a book about how people actually change.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_01: And its great patient argument is that we do not change the way we think we do.
• 1:20:00
  SPEAKER_01: We imagine we'll change through insight.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_01: We'll have the realization, find the right philosophy, make the decisive resolution, and become new.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_01: Pierre tries that approach for a thousand pages, system after system, resolution after resolution, and it never holds.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_01: What actually changes people in this book is different and humbler and slower.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's time, it's love, it's loss, and above all, it's being brought to the edge of death.
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Andre under the sky, Andre dying, Pierre before the firing squad.
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_01: Real transformation comes not from adding the right idea, but almost always from being stripped down, from losing the things you thought you needed and discovering what was underneath.
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_01: People don't think their way to wisdom in this book.
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_01: They suffer their way to it, and then love their way into living it.
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_03: And it's why the book had to be so long.
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_03: You can't dramatize slow change in 200 pages.
• 1:21:10
  SPEAKER_03: Tolstoy needed you to live 15 years with these people so that the change would feel earned, the way it is in a real life.
• 1:21:19
  SPEAKER_03: So gradual you almost don't see it happening until you look back and realize the frantic young man has become someone at peace.
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_01: The second thing it's about is the search for meaning.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_01: And here it makes a specific and I think correct claim.
• 1:21:37
  SPEAKER_01: One that took psychology another century to catch up to.
• 1:21:41
  SPEAKER_01: Pierre's whole arc says meaning is not a question you answer, it's a way you live.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_01: The people who go looking for the meaning of life, as if it were a hidden fact, a doctrine to find, a system to adopt, stay lost because they're looking in the wrong dimension.
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_01: Meaning isn't found by stepping back from your life to analyze it.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's found by stepping into it, into this moment, this task, this person in front of you, with acceptance and love.
• 1:22:12
  SPEAKER_01: Pierre had every external thing and no meaning.
• 1:22:16
  SPEAKER_01: Karateev had nothing and was full of it.
• 1:22:18
  SPEAKER_01: The difference wasn't what they had, it was their relationship to the present moment.
• 1:22:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's the deepest psychological claim in the book.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it's simply true.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_03: And the third thing, the one that scales the personal up to the historical.
• 1:22:36
  SPEAKER_01: The third thing is about control and the illusion of it.
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_01: At every level, the individual soul and the fate of nations, Tolstoy is dismantling the fantasy that a sufficiently powerful will can command reality.
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_01: Napoleon can't control the battle.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_01: The great man is a figurehead taking credit for a wave.
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_01: And Pierre, in miniature, can't force his way to meaning by sheer intellectual will either.
• 1:23:07
  SPEAKER_01: He only finds peace when he stops trying to seize control of life, and learns, like Kutuzov, like Karataev, to accept it and move with its current.
• 1:23:19
  SPEAKER_01: The book's wisdom figures, Kutuzov, Karataev, are all people who've surrendered the illusion of control and found a deeper strength in acceptance.
• 1:23:31
  SPEAKER_01: And the book's tragic or hollow figures, Napoleon, and the earlier grasping Pierre, and the proud early Andre, are all people clenched around the fantasy that they can master life by will.
• 1:23:45
  SPEAKER_01: Tolstoy is saying at every scale, you control far less than you think.
• 1:23:51
  SPEAKER_01: And wisdom begins the moment you stop pretending otherwise and start paying loving attention to what's actually in front of you.
• 1:23:59
  SPEAKER_03: I'd add just one closing note, the thing I most want a first reader to carry in.
• 1:24:06
  SPEAKER_03: People think of war and peace as cold and vast and intimidating, a monument.
• 1:24:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's the opposite.
• 1:24:14
  SPEAKER_03: It's the warmest of the great novels.
• 1:24:17
  SPEAKER_03: Its final verdict on human life is tender and almost absurdly hopeful, that after all the war and striving and philosophy and heartbreak, what redeems a life is love, ordinary, daily, unglamorous, particular love for this family, this person, this hour.
• 1:24:40
  SPEAKER_03: Tolstoy looked at everything history, death, meaning, God, war, and came back to report that a mother with her children and a husband who has stopped running is as close to the meaning of life as human beings get.
• 1:24:57
  SPEAKER_03: For a book with war in its title, its heart is entirely in the piece.
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_01: The thinker and the feeler, the warm family and the severe one.
• 1:25:09
  SPEAKER_01: But the search that ends not in an answer, but in a life.
• 1:25:15
  SPEAKER_01: I came in afraid of its size.
• 1:25:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I think I'll come out grateful for it.
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_03: But read it in winter.
• 1:25:23
  SPEAKER_03: Let it be long.
• 1:25:24
  SPEAKER_03: The length is the gift.
• 1:25:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's the time you get to spend becoming these people.
• 1:25:31
  SPEAKER_03: Don't rush it any more than you'd rush 15 years of your own life.
• 1:25:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that was War and Peace.
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Not really a book about war, but about ordinary people slowly learning what matters.
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_00: A thousand pages in just one conversation.
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_00: That is where we will leave it for today.
• 1:25:54
  SPEAKER_00: A long book has never made you feel you were the problem.
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope this showed you another way in.
• 1:26:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you to Clara and Theo, and thank you for listening.
• 1:26:04
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want a way of working the fits you're brain to work too, not only with books, just contact me.
• 1:26:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be happy to hear you.
• 1:26:13
  SPEAKER_00: I am Daniele Forni, and this has been the Reta Shaman Podcast.
• 1:26:17
  SPEAKER_00: And until the next story, take care of your inner world.