Blood Prism

On Reading War and Peace

56 On Reading War and Peace It’s been months, all winter in fact, and because I cannot read as quickly as I once did I’ve been reading slowly War and Peace, even while the snow like white sparrows in miniature dipped head and head into the ground, even while the darkness lengthened and slowly then began to brighten slightly, the sun thin, but no longer getting thinner. Not “white sparrows” probably. Nonetheless, I’ve plowed through War and Peace and I can’t tell you why at my age and for the first time I am reading it, trying here to figure out what War and Peace has to offer me. Henry I-know-what-they’re-thinking-even-if-they’re-not-aware-they’re-thinkingit -just-yet James was right to call it “baggy,” calling it a “monster,” still, I’ve been reading every day War and Peace and haven’t finished yet. I can’t tell the characters apart that well, even if I’ve stopped flipping back into the back side of the book for the partly helpful dramatis personae. I’m past the need for several maps, but keep on checking footnotes, my next-to-nothing French. I have to say these characters seem poorly differentiated, especially by comparison to others made by other not War and Peace authors. But I’m still reading War and Peace, even while I’m trying, day-byday , to describe for myself the differences between the very first and smallest buds on red birch or on alder now, in March. It’s far from just a matter of the slightest green in leaves that can’t be called leaves yet. I consult my Field Guide and it’s not much help. On the other hand, I got An Atlas of the Universe for the holiday. It has a dim pinhead of lace labeled “Milky Way” in the middle of a zillion other galaxies that look so photographed. How’s that? So maybe I’m distracted, but I’m reading War and Peace more slowly, reading only several pages just before I turn the lights out now. There it is, War and Peace, not glowing on the bedside table, sitting in its blue dust jacket first thing in the morning. In this fashion I’ve gone on, reading War and Peace, this book that Tolstoy wouldn’t call a novel. I can’t get all stirred up, there’s little real suspense, the thing rolls on uphill, somehow, a rock without its Sisyphus. Unless that’s me. I’m mildly keen (?) to know what will come out for people I feel interest in, the lovers, i.e., and there’s Napoleon against the Russian Who’s-It, all the misery of history, the theories of event that Tolstoy puts forth, but I’m not too concerned to know how things will go. It’s not all that dramatic. So why I’ve been reading War and Peace as one year fades I just can’t say. It’s not author’s purpose, whatever that might be, and I don’t believe writing makes anyone immortal. It’s not character and point-of-view, not entertainment, really, sympathy 57 or boredom. Stubbornness, perhaps, but even as my reading slows, puzzled at his blunt diction—“drops dropped,” when it rains—I find myself floating to an end I may not reach, an infinite regress, because this War and Peace gets wider as I go along, its pages drifting off like landscapes, even if a parlor’s been described, a ball, a conference of war. He can spend a lot of time on one eyebrow, arched. I’m getting confused, this frigid spring, by trees that I have named before (though always later on) by flower or by leaf. I’m looking only at the texture of the bark, the color, and these just-cracked buds I haven’t bothered with before. So maybe it’s nothing, this War and Peace, other than its size. Maybe it’s the fact that it exists at all. He can spend a lot of time on one eyebrow, arched. (I know, I just said that.) And maybe I’m too pleased I’ve put off reading War and Peace this long, put it off till 60, although I can’t imagine having tried to read it thirty years ago and hanging on. Like the mouse I saw this morning in an otherwise deserted...