Once I fell into step with the rhythm of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, I could not help but be utterly awe-inspired at every turn. The sheer deftness with which Tolstoy navigates the number of characters he does is astounding despite its seamlessness, or perhaps because of its seamlessness, for deftness is a quality defined by subtlety.
In deft prose, sharp turns are rendered invisible. There’s a three chapter stretch in the first volume that left me breathless. In the space of three chapters Tolstoy moves the reader from the most intimate and coldest of conversations between Prince Vassily and Princess Katerina, scheming to destroy Count Bezukhov’s letter legitimising Pierre’s sonship to him and therefore his inheritance, to the sweeping entrance of Anna Mikhailovna and Pierre into the bedroom of the dying Count, finishing with all of them present in his room standing for the ceremony of extreme unction, then fighting for the aforementioned letter. Tolstoy’s prose is like an omniscient camera floating through a grand hallway, panning to peer into the most private of rooms, before dollying backwards smoothly to fit all characters in the frame. Just how many characters have their souls laid bare in these three chapters?
In the first composition, Vassily’s desire for Bezukhov’s inheritance is obvious, but we are positioned at a perfect distance at which we can still be simultaneously spellbound by the manipulation and faux concern with which he coaxes Katerina for the whereabouts of the letter. As a member of the nobility, Vassily’s capacity to craft a facade of benevolence to mask his selfish motivations can only prove to be even more dangerous when projected onto an even larger scale. Katerina is indifferent to receiving an inheritance, but she does care for the Count, who is her uncle, and her sisters. This concern is wrangled by Vassily into a need to expose the location of the letter, making her an accomplice to this plot, exposing and encouraging in her a hatred for Anna.
Transitioning to the second composition, the camera is much more dynamic. Having followed Anna before this, we understand that her primary motive at this point of time is the social elevation of her son Boris and herself. As with Vassily, she manipulates Pierre to fulfil this motivation, but her means are far more kinetic, quite unlike the hushed whispers, behind-closed-doors method Vassily uses. Pierre, like Katerina, is both indifferent to his inheritance and genuinely concerned for the Count, who is his father. In society he is frowned upon both for his illegitimacy as the Count’s son and his habit of obnoxiously voicing his obnoxious opinions, including but not limited to his adoration for Napoleon Bonaparte, the enemy. Currently unemployed and also unfulfilled and unloved, he becomes the perfect pawn for Anna. She sweeps him through the hallways with such purpose and resolve that all he can do is give himself up entirely to the will of those who were guiding him. The words she utters to Pierre in the Count’s eventual passing, specifically I know you well enough that this will will not turn your heart, are especially chilling. Anna only knows Pierre because she has created him; she has enlightened him with knowledge of his inheritance, including in this education the word duties as intrinsic.
A fifth soul is bared in the final shot, and without a single word of dialogue. It is a close-up, in which Pierre attempts to move his dying father’s lifeless arm. Suddenly becoming cognisant of both his lifelessness and his son’s horror at it, the Count smiles, as if expressing mockery at his own strengthlessness. Reacting to this, Pierre experiences a shudder in his chest, which is a private motion, and sheds a tear, which is a public motion. Their actions are wordless, and so they must be free of manipulation or masked intention. They are only the pure, unadulterated impulses of the soul.
That’s five souls laid bare in three chapters. That’s five individual lives which Tolstoy admits are not merely flotsam and jetsam, expounding on this admission not only by giving them meaning, but beauty and complexity and interconnection as well.
My admission is that I have not yet finished War and Peace. I’m not even a hundred pages in. But I will keep reading.
Tolstoy gives meaning to the human experience in panoramic overtures of interweaving and opposing plots and schemes, but also in private reveries, joining his characters in what translator Richard Pevear describes as their metaphysical solitude. Though this phrase specifically pertains to Anna Karenina––which I did finish––I find it to be the perfect descriptor for the works of another European artist: Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski, specifically his film The Double Life of Veroniqué.
Veroniqué is the first Kieślowski film partially produced outside of his native Poland, with half of the film taking place in France. It is a diptych that centers around two characters, a Polish woman called Weronika and a French woman called Veroniqué, both played by Irène Jacob. Yes, that is probably a meta-comment, as is the two characters becoming cognisant of each other during a demonstration — when Kieślowski’s film Blind Chance was suppressed by the Polish government — and the fact that the encounter is only attested to by Veroniqué’s camera. But Kieślowski would despise a reading of any of his films that only concerned himself.
As fantastical and cosmic as the plot of Veroniqué is, Kieślowski’s camera spends a large amount of time capturing Weronika or Veroniqué in moments alone, in close-ups lit with a golden-green haze. So much of the runtime is spent on Irène Jacob’s silent face, as she observes, listens, contemplates. In these moments of intimacy, Kieślowski directly links both characters in their metaphysical solitude. Weronika often has a strange feeling that she‘s not alone in this world. When she passes away, Veroniqué has a strange sensation that she is alone.
In letting the camera linger on these moments alone as religiously as he does, Kieślowski gives not just meaning, but numinous importance to every thought, every sensation of yearning, grief, loneliness. To Kieślowski, even these are not just flotsam and jetsam in the river of life.
The Martin Luther King Jr. quote above has stuck with me for some time. It seems to arrive whenever I feel a sense of existential loneliness, or a sense of cosmic insignificance, or just really sad, man. I often mispronounce or misspell the strange words flotsam and jetsam, but the sentiment is constant.
When I was in the fourth grade I started having these harrowing moments of hyper-consciousness where I realised I was experiencing the world through a very specific, narrow set of eyes. I would take a step back and realise that there existed so much outside of my daily routines and obligations, so much before and so much after. I realised that one day these eyes would close for the last time, and that the world as I knew it will have ended.
A few years later I became acquainted with the notion of existential loneliness. I began to think that, confronted with my own insignificance, I might as well stop studying and give up on my regular inconsequential life as I knew it, for nothing mattered. I gazed at people going about their daily lives wondering if they knew what I knew, and if they did, I wondered why they didn’t just drop everything and wait for the worms. They didn’t, no one ever did, and neither did I.
One day at the end of a group call my friend Khush told me that recently he had been thinking about transcendental purpose. I had thought about it too but couldn’t find the right words at that moment so I just said yeah, man. Afterwards I asked to meet him to discuss it more fully, perhaps over a plate of Nasi Lemak. When I reached the MRT station I called him and he said he had just woken up. So I headed to Adam Road Food Centre and queued first. I reached the front of the queue but still he had not arrived, so I let the people behind me order first. Eventually he did come, and we sat down, took off our masks, and ate.
I still feel lonely sometimes. But after conversations like that one, I feel it a little less. I’m not entirely sure if my life is as Tolstoy writes, intrinsically linked in interweaving plots and schemes, let alone if it as Kieślowski films, with my every thought bearing meaning. But it’s gotta mean something, right?
