After Reading
We Finally Learned That We Know Nothing Reading Tolstoy's War and Peace
War and Peace is so vast that I have to jot down my thoughts one by one, afraid I’ll lose myself in the labyrinth otherwise. Even then, these notes are just fragments, barely touching the surface of what this book contains. The Russian Who Knows Nothing There’s a passage in the novel that made me laugh out loud in bed at midnight. Tolstoy describes Pfuel as one of those hopelessly self-confident men, unchanging and ready to die for his beliefs—a type that can only be German, because only Germans derive such certainty from abstract ideas like science, from the illusion of possessing perfect truth. The French are self-assured because they believe themselves irresistibly charming to everyone, in both mind and...
North Ward