Literature comes from the soul. Writing comes from the brain performing an algorithm. Writing is recursive, regurgitated chatter. Literature is an externalization of the well-wrought inner structure.
Even while they praise you, no one likes someone who steps out of line or races ahead or rewrites rules or creates hybrid realities. No one likes free artists of themselves. If you don't read books, you'll unfortunately be relegated to taking advice from far less interesting sources.
I'd rather get my advice from Tolstoy than TikTok. Enforced stupidity is enforced unhappiness. Many current orthodoxies and lifestyles are enforced unhappiness.
The paradox of doing something extraordinary is that most of the people you know prefer you wouldn’t (on some level).
One thing I'm always struck by and touched by, reading Tolstoy—whether his fiction, biographies about him, or now his letters—is the shock that family life produced in him: a bachelor into his mid-thirties, a man who, as he writes in his own wonderful and moving book Confession, spent his twenties gambling, dueling, fighting in wars, fucking prostitutes, committing every sin. Though Tolstoy was clearly among the most difficult and demanding of husbands, family life and fatherhood—being a husband in the ontological sense—produced a deep moral transformation in him. “I've, changed terribly since I got married, and much of what I didn't acknowledge before has become intelligible to me.”
With marriage comes his greatest book, War and Peace. Fatherhood and authorship converge. There is a great masculine fertility in prime Tolstoy—both the man and the author. “I'm very glad that I love my wife,” Tolstoy writes, “although I love her less than my novel.”
This is what I mean by difficult: immensely loving, yet at his core, a man of talent. The daemon rules the husband. The husband rules the wife. The wife rules the children.
I woke up late today in a strange mood. Even though I got home last night relatively early, exhausted, I couldn’t fall asleep. So I got up and ran and ran and went to the gym and scrolled Twitter. Nights when I don’t have or don’t go to the theater remind me, in a not-great way, of another era of my life. New York was a video game where I was roaming and roaming for something—sex, a party, a networking opportunity, a conversation; generalized lostness.
On January 26, 1862, Tolstoy writes to a friend, “I’m so out of touch with everything, from sticking closely to my job, that nothing else even enters my head. My teeth are falling out, and I still haven’t gotten married, and I suppose I’ll simply remain single. I’m no longer afraid of being single. What are you doing, and when shall we see you in Russia, for you won’t send me abroad?”
The greatest writers are not easy creatures. They are indeed daemonic, thick-cored with contradictions; prone to immoral extremes of love and hate, piety and atheism, belief and nihilism, lust and devotion.
“I know now that I have a soul, and an immortal one. At least, I often think I know it. And I know there’s a God. A long time ago, I didn’t believe in this. Recently, and more and more often, I’m seeing proof and confirmation in everything. And I’m glad of it. I’m not a Christian and still far off from being one. But experience has taught me not to believe in the infallibility of my judgment and that anything can happen. All knowledge comes to people by irrational paths.”
The reason that I limit my criticism to public figures, institutions, generational generalizations, or symbolize it and aggregate it in my plays and fiction—like into these characters—is that I want to leave room for the polymorphous and dialectical reality of real human character. I want to avoid gossip, which insists on a one-to-one correspondence between a person’s supposed behavior and the deep recurrence of their all-too-human reality.
I really liked this. Positively reminded me of Mann’s essay on Goethe and Tolstoy