(What follows is part two of a two-part post. Part one can be found here.)
In a lonely freshman year, I loved my way through War and Peace, but a decade later, in heartbreak, Anna Karenina was a punishment that I could not, after all, endure.
When I began the novel I had just separated from the person I would, in a brighter season, end up marrying. I realized Anna Karenina was an undoubtedly, terrible accompaniment to heartbreak, and in winter, and in a city, no less, that was too small to get lost in, and too far from any crystalline fields or fierce pines that I might’ve hoped to find some raw solace in my environment. Which is to say, I tried to feel my way to catharsis through Anna’s pain, but, lacking a starry Russian sky or the sound of distant horses, I came up short in the relief category—to feel shot in the heart on dirty slush streets at a tired bus stop in January is simply another level of hopelessness entirely. I wanted to believe myself small, find my pain insignificant against an infinite plain. I wanted to box with the sublime and come out throbbing, with a clear new sense of what mattered, i.e., I was still in my body, on the earth, and with other bodies—animals, plants, mountains—that suffered in all kinds of ways, and further, cared not about my grieving. But, subject to an indoor season, and regardless, too heartbroken for intervention by any spiritual narrative I might construe, my pain trapped me—and Tolstoy provided no exit.
Not that I didn’t try. Night after night, dressed in various wool layers, I’d retire early to the spare, drafty bedroom at a friend’s house, and, by a small lamp that made about as much light as the reflection off snow, take up the book with bloodless fingers. I had a paperback copy, a 1961 Signet Classic, its pages dry and nicotine colored, its text like shriveled ants. I preferred this aesthetic, likening the reading to something forced and unpleasant. In my broken state, I wanted to permit myself no joy, convince myself life truly was awful.
I proceeded in this fashion for several weeks, holding Anna Karenina in front of my face, and making almost zero progress in relation to the hours spent in said position. For one thing, every few minutes my eyes would stray from page to cellphone, on which I had saved one of the earliest texts from my love:
I’M ALIVE. I WANT YOU.
Vronsky probably said something similar to Anna before she threw herself under the train, is about what I was thinking. And, my phone stayed dark, and the darkness, which was an absence, kept me from progressing any further with Tolstoy. I gave up reading on page 320 when the lovers’ doom becomes palpable between them. Idiots! Idiots! I felt, not empathy. It was soon after this grand submission that some fortuitous circumstances enabled me to move into an empty mansion, and I left Anna Karenina behind on my friend’s nightstand. In my new lodgings, I chose the smallest room, an uppermost corner whose ceilings slanted like a hideout’s, whose wall color and lush carpet were the same pink as the inside of a mouth. It was here that I worked out the rest of my grieving, sitting on the rug with, gradually, the windows open, cutting out tiny phrases from old books, arranging them, making a new book by destroying a book, the opposite of reading, what I needed.
Leap ahead weeks, months, a year or two, and indeed, great thanks, it all worked out, I was reunited with the person my heart was so broken for. Perhaps the bookmark where I gave up on Anna Karenina symbolizes a before and after in my relationship. I may finish the after without going back to the beginning, I’m not sure, but I have been wondering: Anna Karenina read only partway is proof in this case, of what? How much space the heart broken takes? Or, maybe it’s that there are some stories so sad we cannot read, and also be them. We have to move away to work it out.
