Tag: Tolstoy

  • Three score and ten

    He was a shadow of his former self, and his memory was not what it used to be. But I could see his eyes light up when he was reminded of who I was. We spoke a bit, and I like to think that a bit of his joviality returned in those brief moments. My interactions with him are more than three decades old, and our memories of each other are probably a bigger bond than any relationship we have. He complimented my demeanour, much to the annoyance of the other M. He passed away a few weeks later. These days, I am ambivalent about meeting old people. On one hand, I think I’d like to remember them in their prime. But then again, there is a good chance that I’d be meeting them for the last time. So these days, when I do meet, my behaviour factors that in.

    The worst thing about death is the fact that when a man is dead it is impossible any longer to undo the harm you have done him, or to do the good you haven’t done him…They say: live in such a way as to be always ready to die. I would say: live in such a way that anyone can die without you having anything to regret.

    Leo Tolstoy, (via Arthur C. Brooks’ From Strength to Strength)

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  • Finn, Tolstoy, and happy families

    “You’ve heard that line about all happy families being the same?”

    “War and Peace”, I said.

    “Anna Karenina, but that’s not the point. The point is, it’s untrue. No family, happy or unhappy, is quite like any other.”

    I read this in The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn recently. I use the Anna Karenina principle quite a bit in many contexts and discussions. In fact, recently, while reading Guns, Germs & Steel, I realised he had used this framing too. To put it simply, there are x number of conditions that definitely need to be met for something to succeed. The ‘something’ could be anything from origin of life to economical supremacy, and the ‘x’ conditions would change with that context. But in a given context, only those who fulfill all the x conditions will succeed.

    Naturally, as a believer, I was miffed by Finn’s (character’s) statement. But, could he be right?

    As I write this, D and I are a day away from celebrating 21 years of being together, 15 of them in a married state. Speaking of state, Kerala in the late 90s and early noughties, much like other non-metros in India, wasn’t friendly to intimacy or dating. In fact, the reaction to our relationship was actually a combination of the two – intimidating! Especially since a couple of religions were involved. Anyhow, here we are, 21 years later – happy.

    The stage was set for a thought experiment. Are we happy in the same way other couples are? I’d think not. I don’t really have data, so I will use  a simple non social-media-posturing observation. There are a lot of happy families with kids.* We chose not to succumb to that genetic pressure. So we’re different from other happy families. Does that mean Finn is right, and Tolstoy was wrong?

    I think it just isn’t as binary as that. Tolstoy was right because if one figured out the conditions that need to be met for a happy marriage, I have a feeling the successful couples would be meeting them (children most likely will not feature in that list). Finn is right too, because the way in which the couples met them would be drastically different from each other.

    In any case, I don’t think we have found an objective framing of happiness to begin with!

    *There is interesting data (Google searches and experiments) to show how “kids bring happiness” is just belief transmission for evolution’s needs and not the truth it is portrayed to be. But people have their own narratives of what happiness is, so I’ll leave it at that.