Miranda > Recent Status Updates

All this talk of weddings is making me sentimental

Omg I just finished book 1 and I am eager to see where book 2 goes. This book!!!!!

Wow, Levin tearing up has me tearing up, sitting in the sun outside work.

Did not expect so much discussion of owner vs worker economics, but here we are. The pitfalls of intellectualism etc.
“I am seeking for a way of making labor profitable for me and for the laborers. I want to establish-“
“You do not want to establish anything. You simply want to be original, as you always have done, and to show you are not just exploiting the peasants, but have ideas!”

Tolstoy is so good at including side characters who both make the world more real (and the relationships in it), and provide a reason for a main character to expand upon their own views beyond internal monologue, by being in dialogue with another. A foil of sorts. Really well done. Inspiring writing in how effective and human it is.

Part 3 chapter 13 one of my favorites so far. It’s just Alexey figuring out what he wants to do about the affair, but it took me back in time to various experiences I’ve had in my life. It was easier to see my own mistakes when reading the character thinking those thoughts. A sad and difficult position. Tolstoy understands his characters well.

“…she went out with vigorous steps with her music under her arm, and disappeared in the semi-darkness of the summer night, carrying with her the secret of what was important, and to what she owed her enviable tranquility and dignity.”

Part 2 chapter 29 was !!!! wow. Tolstoy knows how to write a scene!! Amazing dialogue with 2 people entirely misunderstanding one another in understandable ways.

“What am I to do?
He could find no answer, except life’s usual answered to the most complex and insolvable questions. That answer is: live in the needs of the day, that is, find forgetfulness.”

“She was pounding on the gate of his poetic memory. But the gate was shut. There was no room for her in his poetic memory. There was room for her only on the rug.”

“Surely she, too, had harbored the blissful hope of using her body as a poster for her soul.”

“The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”

“The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which take us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal.”

This book is already excellent.

“You were a memory, not a goal” bruh.