Needlework

Anyone familiar with my writings might notice a pattern (or two) in the way I think. Themes thread their way through my words, showing up as a few stitches here, wending their way beneath the surface, then popping up again to add to the design being created on the canvas. In my months of adamantly not writing, I almost lost the thread, but I’m not sure if it was damaged, hopelessly(?) knotted, or just buried beneath other colors. As you might have guessed, I’ve picked up an end and am hoping it will be long enough to go through the eye of the needle and stay there.

In one of my earliest Collecting Thoughts posts, I wrote, “The question-of-talent pendulum in my mind has swung widely. Now, I’ll commit only to saying that I’d rather not comment on the talent/hard work debate.”

Leo Tolstoy has affected the way I see the world. I give him kudos for that. He had a talent for communicating the thoughts in his head, or maybe it was a talent for describing the details of life so well that they make the characters on the page almost as real as the ones I’m living with. Was it talent, though? Perhaps Tolstoy had the time and inclination to develop his powers of observation and to hone his writing skills. Tolstoy, himself, would say that looking for answers in such questions about talent/skill would likely lead to false conclusions, because we’d be looking in the wrong places.

According to Gary Saul Morson, in Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and Peace’: “In the world of War and Peace, the small, simple actions of life are the only ones that can be important, even if—or especially if—their importance is unnoticed.”

War and Peace is a crazy book, and by the time I was ten pages into epilogue two, I feared that it might drive me crazy, but it is a magnificent work. Tolstoy would take offense at it being dubbed, “one of the greatest novels of all time,” because he did not consider it a novel, and labeling it as such pretty much negates the claim that it’s one of the greatest, simply because it does not conform to the almost universally accepted criteria of what makes a novel.

According to Morson (and contrary to many critics), Tolstoy knew what he was doing when he wrote War and Peace. He was deliberate in his word choice, in his placement of scenes, in the details he recounted (many of which left critics scratching their heads). Further, he had been practicing, so to speak, for War and Peace with everything he had written up to the that point. Hmmm… That little insight leads me to an interesting notion, one I had not considered: could Tolstoy have written War and Peace if he had written nothing prior to it? If War and Peace had been his first published work, would he have been considered one of the greatest writers of all time or just a hack? In other words, did Tolstoy possess enough talent to do a bang-up job the first time out of the gate, or was it a matter of building skill? What’s more, would Tolstoy’s strange book have gotten the pass it did if he had not already proven himself?

Then again, does any of this matter? Well, yes, it does—especially to anyone trying to figure out how to best live these lives we’ve been given.