"My life is a stupid and spiteful joke someone has played on me" English translation "A confession", Leo Tolstoy
If you as literary critics or just people that read a lot, Leo Tolstoy will be listed somewhere towards the top of their list as the greatest writers that have lived. Even myself, who only in the last ten years or so has become a reader, unlike, for instance. my sister, who has been a fervent reader all her life, has read at least bits and pieces of some of his works. But I was recently turned on to his most personal writing, part auto-biographical and part philosophical, Tolstoy wrote "A confession" ten years after War and Peace and two years after Anna Karenina.
Although over 100 years old, his evaluation of people who by all accounts have reached high levels of success remains poignant. My years in academia observing those that are my older and more "successful" peers have already suggested to me what he in many ways corroborated.
He writes of these revelations "all this befell me at a time when all around me I had what was considered completely good fortune. I was not yet fifty; I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved, good children, and a large estate... I was respected by my relations and acquaintances... I was praised by others...." Yet, one of the most respected people and "fortunate" people among his peers, Tolstoy, like many of his peers, was miserable. He was smart enough to understand what the majority intelligentsia worldview actually meant to things like purpose, ethics, love, integrity and meaning.
It is anecdotal, because getting the degree of honesty (and this by itself is complicated by the degree of shielding we naturally do to protect ourselves) needed would be probably impossible, but my experiences would agree: I don't know anybody (and in the world of academia-- while I love it and my peers00 we are probably the most clear-cut population of intellectual snobs so I feel particularly qualified to speak) that are actually happy. Think about that for a second.
Of course, I can't crawl into their heads and see if they are happy or miserable. Of course, there are clear moments of elation (a discovery!), a newborn baby in the family, a prestigious award, the joy of laughter after I tell them a mostly inappropriate joke, that bring moments of fleeting pleasure.
But in the colleagues I know the best, it always and totally, seems to come crashing down. And like in Tolstoy's world of the elite artists and poets and writers, and in the world of the successful engineers and lawyers and elite businesswomen and men, I strongly predict it is all the same as it is in academia: consciously or subconsciously, there is a baseline of unhappiness and misery that can be traced to the most obvious of all causes, one that we alone among all species suffer: a lack of (perceived) purpose in the prevailing worldview of intelligentsia.
And Tolstoy is just as sharp on what exactly the knee-jerk solutions are. The first stage is to submerge yourself in things that you think could bring satisfaction and purpose: For him it was writing, and teaching, and rubbing shoulders with the most powerful and intelligent. For most of us, it is working disproportionately and trying to find greater satisfaction with career success. When all this miserably fails, like it inevitably does with everyone, he moved on to his family, again, like many of us also do. Maybe he could find purpose in his marriage, and then his kids, and then giving his kids the best opportunities he could and setting them up for the best life he could think of. But his mind kept moving back to the questions: Even if so, then what? How is this at all purpose if it just drags the same problems to them? And so this is always a dead-end for him -- and us -- as well.
There were no answers in any of these things. We also try other things. As I've written before, given the immense ease to do so with today's amazing technology, distraction is the lazier answer. Fantasy sports, traveling, hobbies, binge watching the Ozarks (great show by the way, my wife and I successfully binge-watched this weekend in between taking care of 4 kids), buying more and more stuff (this has become such an issue know you can binge-watch shows on minimalism!), getting heavily involved in national and state policy, living on facebook, etc. The list goes on and changes from generation to generation. But the point is Tolstoy was fortunate enough to be bright and diligent and persistent enough to get to the answers of the questions he was asking and realize the dead-end of it all, many of which people never live long enough to realize themselves.
The next step, and because Tolstoy was among the intellectual elite it was easier for him, was to access the leading thinkers, philosophical and scientific and such, and, well, lay down on the proverbial couch and see if they had any answers. After his inquiries, it should not be surprising that nobody had any satisfactory answers for Leo Tolstoy.
Living out the rationalists' worldview, with Jesus Christ at the centerpiece, was the only solution for Leo Tolstoy. By all accounts Leo Tolstoy was a much happier man after his conversion, a man that was able to live with purpose and integrity, when he adapted worldviews, and, subsequently, was adopted as a son of God.
Happiness and Christianity are over and over mistakenly married together: as a Christian, in my experience, life is even more miserable. It's not that you have to play with a different set of rules as most others, although that does not help, but your eyes are open to the misery that everyone holds (which would be non-consequential in itself), but, like a demasking agent, your heart is open as well, leading to feeling the misery of others. Frustration, in my experience, increases dramatically-- you see others' misery is often self-inflicted, and there is nothing you can do to help them. Trying only exacerbates the frustration: if it is family, it is even worse, because there is that sense of obligation. It is hard to learn to just let go and let them be.
But these examples are not the same Misery (capital M) that Tolstoy is concerned with, and it is not the ultimate misery that many of the most intelligent and honest people see the most vividly. To paraphrase the remarkably simple and true words of Tim Keller, If we came from no purpose and meaning, and we are, as all accounts point, headed to a collective total demolition when the sun burns out, there can logically be absolutely no meaning and purpose in between. Even if we found a way to live forever on this planet, whatever forever means, there still would be no purpose: There is nothing truer than that.
Tolstoy went in every direction (I suppose today we would do most research online, travel to different regions of the world, etc., but the same questions and ideas behind the voyage remain the same) many of us go to find meaning and purpose. As luck would have it, for him, he greatly outlived the average lifespan of a Russian in the late 19th century which enabled him the time to find that purpose and meaning; not subjective meaning, that existentialism falsely offers, but objective and logical purpose and meaning.
One other point: if Tolstoy had found it earlier in his life, would he have been as great of an artist? Would Anna Karenina exist? I dont know. This is akin to people that may ask the question if Ryan Adams was never addicted to heroin, would Love is Hell be as great as an album as it was? We don't know enough scientifically about how the truly creatives' brains work. But this is not the point at all. In fact, it is just another distraction at getting to the truly meaningful answers, so im sorry i wasted your time reading this paragraph.
I hope your journey ends as well as Tolstoy's did, where I suspect he is enjoying eternal meaning and joy, and writing up a storm.
