During the hours of solitude, suffering, and partial delirium he spent after he was wounded, the more deeply he penetrated into the new principle of eternal love revealed to him, the more he unconsciously detached himself from earthly life … It was the last spiritual struggle between life and death, in which death gained the victory. Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I only understand because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.
The satisfaction of one’s needs—good food, cleanliness, and freedom—now that he was deprived of all of these–seemed to Pierre to constitute perfect happiness. That man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity … And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned another new, consolatory truth—that nothing in the world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he needs to be unhappy and lack freedom … He discovered that when he had married his wife—of his own free will as it had seemed to him—he had been no more free than now when they locked him up at night in a stable.
From “War and Peace,” by Leon Tolstoy
I read this novel again and highlighted some Leon Tolstoy’s notes on love and happiness. This super-genius visualized everything he wrote to the finest detail. This attribute makes this work one the greatest one of all time (as extraordinary as “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes, my ‘unbiased’ number one.) He depicted with accuracy Russian high society in the early nineteen century. Tolstoy was a philosopher, and his views on love and happiness reflect his Christian beliefs. “The satisfaction of one’s needs—good food, cleanliness, and freedom—constitutes perfect happiness.” Yet, “there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free.”
His aristocratic position made Count Tolstoy insensitive to the plight of the ordinary people in Russia, mainly the serfs. Despite his comparison with being locked up in a stable, he got married and had sixteen children by his wife and at least another one by one of his serfs.
