Writer's Diary
8/5/26
Reading big chunks of War and Peace today, relatively near the end of the novel, which feels like it ends a hundred times before it keeps going. Prince Andrei is dying, but he’s been reunited with Natasha. He regrets his cruelty. She regrets her deception and betrayal. The reader hopes against hope that Prince Andrei will live, but he will not. Natasha will marry Pierre. We know this, I know this, I’ve been down this road before.
I go for walks on this island that I’m on, on a road that I’ve never been on before.
I haven’t worn shoes for the past five days, actually.
I have such a craving for a simple life. I’ve totally lost my appetite for complex social calculations.
I wonder about the versions of myself that I’ve had to cull in order to survive in the city.
E says the city makes people go crazy, you have to numb parts of yourself, you have to stop feeling certain things. And of course that’s true. It feels true—truer and truer, especially the more expensive things become, the more impossible making it work feels.
The solution in Shakespeare to court politics is to escape to the countryside, but even in the countryside there’s Starlink or a hotspot.
The island is not tropical, by the way. It’s got a lot of scrubby oak trees, tall grass. It feels a bit Mediterranean.
I have no idea where I’m going, so I just follow the single road, afraid to make turns. I don’t have a phone with me. I’m a little sunburned and dehydrated from being at the beach all day.
I think about Tolstoy’s estate, how nice that must have been. Freshly mown fields and wooden houses and beehives and horses and dogs and cows, one’s own children and village children, the smell of baking bread, the sound of the clucking of chickens, the rattle of carriage wheels as letters arrive from Moscow, or Chekhov arriving for tea with the master.
We experience two landscapes at once, the landscape around us and the imaginary landscape that the mind reconstructs, which is out of time, a composite of ideas and data and fancy and imagination.
The person I was a year ago seems fairly foreign, and the person I was three summers ago or four summers ago is entirely alien, a different species—not for any particular reason other than that life forces you out of certain molds, forces mutation, evolution, forces reevaluation, forces perspective.