Here I am, with a little less than 20 minutes to go. The story has made me laugh, think, turn away in disgust and cry. It has given me momentous frustration but gratuitous enjoyment. I’m not going to sit here and attempt to wax eloquent about what it is and what it isn’t.

To me, a good book is one in which there is not a single character in which you completely identify yourself with. I read for the purpose of perspective. I read for the simple enjoyment of thinking about things from a completely different perspective than I otherwise would. War and Peace has accomplished this feat many times over.

Personally, Prince Andrew is by far my favourite character. His resolute and complete character shift from life to death is immaculate. It is an almost too perfect paradigm of life, love, and death in reciprocated orders. I’ve read many tragedies but nothing quite compares to the way in which Tolstoy handles a story. When I watch television or movies everything seems so predictable and therefore un-enjoyable – but with Tolstoy, the gripping thought of predictability is exactly what compels one to continue reading.

I challenge you all to read this novel. Here are a couple of my favourite quotations from this masterpiece of literature:

“Never, never marry, my dear fellow! That’s my advice: never marry till you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of, and until you have ceased to love the woman of your choice and have seen her plainly as she is, or else you will make a cruel and irrevocable mistake. Marry when you are old and good for nothing—or all that is good and noble in you will be lost. It will all be wasted on trifles. Yes! Yes! Yes! Don’t look at me with such surprise. If you marry expecting anything from yourself in the future, you will feel at every step that for you all is ended, all is closed except the drawing room, where you will be ranged side by side with a court lackey and an idiot!”

Prince Andrew on marriage, unfortunately, Pierre does not take his advice!

“Desire nothing, be not anxious or envious. Man’s future and thy own fate must remain hidden from thee, but live so that thou mayest be ready for anything. If it be God’s will to prove thee in the duties of marriage, be ready to fulfill His will”

Princess Mary in contemplation of her unhappiness

“A good chess player having lost a game is sincerely convinced that his loss resulted from a mistake he made and looks for that mistake in the opening, but forgets that at each stage of the game there were similar mistakes and that none of his moves were perfect. He only notices the mistake to which he pays attention, because his opponent took advantage of it. How much more complex than this is the game war”

Tolstoy

“Tout vient a point a celui qui sait attendre” – “Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait”

General Kutozov on his success in the Turkish War

“Qui s’excuse s’accuse” – “Who excuses himself, accuses himself”

Julie Kuragin gossiping as usual

“Do you know, I really believe she is un petite peu amoureuse du jeune homme” – “A little bit in love with the young man”

Julie Kuragin gossiping as usual

“We play at magnanimity and sensibility and all that stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kind-hearted that she can’t look at the blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce. The talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It’s all rubbish!”

Prince Andrew on War

“”If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain death, as now.”

Prince Andrew on War

“He showed an interest in trifles, joked about de Beausset’s love of travel, and chatted carelessly, as a famous, self-confident surgeon who knows his job does when turning up his sleeves and putting on his apron while a patient is being strapped to the operating table.”

Tolstoy describing Napoleon, and perhaps his perspective of Napoleon’s morality.

“He sat, sunk deep in a folding armchair, and continually cleared his throat and pulled at the collar of his coat which, though it was unbuttoned, still seemed to pinch his neck”

Tolstoy describing General Kutozov’s countenance and composure after Moscow was lost to Napoleon

“The countess looks with timid horror at her son’s eager, excited face as he said this. She realized that if she said a word about his not going to the battle he would say something about men, honour, and the fatherland – something senseless, masculine and obstinate which there would be no contradicting…”

Countess Rostova pleading with her youngest child not to go to the war. This quote is fitting for almost all of Dubya’s Terrorism speeches.

“Toward the end of the evening, however, as the wife’s face grew more flushed and animated, the husband’s became more and more melancholy and solemn, as though there were but a given amount of animation between them and as the wife’s share increased the husband’s diminished”

Tolstoy describing how a woman reacts to being flirted with in public in the full view of her husband

“Man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s soul. And without considering the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, he snatches at the first approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible and says: ‘This is the cause!’”

Tolstoy dissing Historians (which he does a lot!)

“Now that he was telling it all to Natasha he experienced that pleasure which a man has when women listen to him – not a clever women who when listening either tries to remember what they hear to enrich their mind and when opportunity offers to retell it, or who wish to adopt it to some thought of their own and promptly contribute their own clever comments prepared in their little mental workshop – but the pleasure given by real women gifted with a capacity to select and absorb the very best a man shows of himself”

Tolstoy describing how Natasha listens to Pierre

“Natasha and Pierre, left alone, also began to talk as only a husband and wife can talk, that is, with extraordinary clearness and rapidity, understanding and expressing each other’s thoughts in ways contrary to all rules of logic, without premises, deductions, or conclusions, and in a quite peculiar way.”

Tolstoy describing how married couples communicate

“Every human action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body. I life my arm and let it fall. My action seems to me free; but asking myself whether I could raise my arm in every direction, I see that I raised it in the direction in which there was least obstruction to that action either from things around me or from the construction of my own body. I chose one out of all the possible directions because in it there were fewest obstacles. For my action to be free it was necessary that it should encounter no obstacles. To conceive of a man being free we must imagine him outside space, which is evidently impossible”

Tolstoy on the idea of freedom and free will

That’s all I care to dig for. Now I’m off to finish this journey. Good Night!