The Awakening

I feel that at the speed I am reading I’ll certainly be through with this novel by the time you are born. Completing this novel will certainly give me the strength to conquer others. Yes, I use the word conquer. Although the writing/translation has been somewhat updated, it’s still not really in the modern style that I am accustomed to in my other readings. I can hardly wait to get to my Pevear and Volokhonsky translations.

So, I’m now on page 234 and what I am doing is placing marks in the book at pages which contain passages that I would like to comment upon.

So from chapter XXVIII – “The Awakening” – I discovered the following passages that moved me.

He stopped again, folded his hands in front of his breast as he used to do when a little child, lifted his eyes, and said, addressing some one: "Lord, help me, teach me, come enter within me and purify me of all this abomination."

He prayed, asking God to help him, to enter into him and cleanse him; and what he was praying for had happened already: the God within him had awakened his consciousness. He felt himself one with Him, and therefore felt not only the freedom, fullness and joy of life, but all the power of righteousness. All, all the best that a man could do he felt capable of doing.

His eyes filled with tears as he was saying all this to himself, good and bad tears: good because they were tears of joy at the awakening of the spiritual being within him, the being which had been asleep all these years; and bad tears because they were tears of tenderness to himself at his own goodness.

He felt hot, and went to the window and opened it. The window opened into a garden. It was a moonlit, quiet, fresh night; a vehicle rattled past, and then all was still. The shadow of a tall poplar fell on the ground just opposite the window, and all the intricate pattern of its bare branches was clearly defined on the clean swept gravel. To the left the roof of a coach-house shone white in the moonlight, in front the black shadow of the garden wall was visible through the tangled branches of the trees.

Nekhlyudov gazed at the roof, the moonlit garden, and the shadows of the poplar, and drank in the fresh, invigorating air.

"How delightful, how delightful; oh, God, how delightful" he said, meaning that which was going on in his soul.

There specifically two parts to the above passage that I’d like to comment upon. From the beginning of the selection to the sentence ending with the word “goodness”, a scene is played out that I feel I have seen myself almost recreate in my own life. I have found myself – at times – before I really began to explore my relationship with a spiritual entity “requesting” some sort of assistance with a problem I was facing. I cannot say that I felt any sort of weight lifted from me or a “spirit” entering into me. I can say though that did feel some sort of “power of righteousness” and I feel that was as a direct result of me placing my faith in the action of prayer as a possible solution to the problem I was facing. I felt that the act of praying was the best that I could do and that action itself was going to solve my problem…not necessarily a “God” or “spirit”. The feeling of righteousness gained just by the act of praying is a possible reason that led me down one of my paths of exploration of my spirituality and faith.

The second selection from that passage above is where Nekhlyudov is gazing at the scene outside of his window.

With my inability to completely relate to Nekhlyudov in the first part of the above passage, with this second part, I can totally relate.

It was a moonlit, quiet, fresh night; a vehicle rattled past, and then all was still. The shadow of a tall poplar fell on the ground just opposite the window, and all the intricate pattern of its bare branches was clearly defined on the clean swept gravel. To the left the roof of a coach-house shone white in the moonlight, in front the black shadow of the garden wall was visible through the tangled branches of the trees.

Nekhlyudov gazed at the roof, the moonlit garden, and the shadows of the poplar, and drank in the fresh, invigorating air.

It was on more than one occasion that I stood in the deepest night or in the earliest of mornings in the cold crisp snow and observed the earth just as above. It was either in Vermont or in Romania. And – in keeping with Tolstoy’s philosophy of disclosure – I was probably in some sort altered state of mind which I feel I could apply to Nekhlyudov and his particular mental state which forced him to seek the intervention of ‘God”.

And now WTFED:

“When you do not work you become bored. When you are bored, you sin”