Anna Karenina

I went to see my movie tonight.  I am claiming rights only because I spent several months and 850 pages reading it.  It was lovely.  Everything I could have hoped for, but watching it made me realize that it wasn't the "story" that held my attention during the months I spent reading the book.  It was the psychological and spiritual insights.

For example, the first line of the book is:

'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'

I could think on this one line for ages.  It is so insightful and so utterly true.

And then there is the psychology of Anna.  I think the movie treated it very well, but the most powerful part of her downward spiral has to be read, because somewhere in her thoughts, you start recognizing your own voice in her irrationality which makes her tragic ending all the more shocking.

Lastly, I love the transformation of Levin.  I wish I could carry his final insights around with me like a pocket Bible.  Below is just a small passage from the end of the book which I think is Tolstoy's main point.  This is part of Levin's epiphany:

Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and
himself too, there was nothing in store but suffering, death, and
forgetfulness, he had made up his mind that life was impossible
like that, and that he must either interpret life so that it
would not present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil,
or shoot himself.

But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and
feeling, and had even at that very time married, and had had many
joys and had been happy, when he was not thinking of the meaning
of his life.

What did this mean?  It meant that he had been living rightly,
but thinking wrongly.

He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual
truths that he had sucked in with his mother's milk, but he had
thought, not merely without recognition of these truths, but
studiously ignoring them.

Now it was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of the
beliefs in which he had been brought up.

"What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if
I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live
for God and not for my own desires?  I should have robbed and
lied and killed.  Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my
life would have existed for me."  And with the utmost stretch of
imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would
have been himself, if he had not known what he was living for.

"I looked for an answer to my question.  And thought could not
give an answer to my question--it is incommensurable with my
question.  The answer has been given me by life itself, in my
knowledge of what is right and what is wrong.  And that knowledge
I did not arrive at in any way, it was given to me as to all
men, _given_, because I could not have got it from anywhere.'

So much good stuff!  I got this from Project Gutenberg online.  Daniel went to see it with me and he was wishing he understood the story better.  They director was so creative with the scenes so they could fit all 850 pages into 2 hours, but if you haven't read the book, it's easy to get confused.  I suggest reading the cliffnotes or something before watching.  Also, the R rating is for a little gore that couldn't be avoided in the storyline.