Yes, as a writer, you have to ask yourself why, why do it, why pollute the airwaves already full, why write obscure novel-like things, why rattle on.  But for the forgiving spirit with which literary attempts are often regarded...

The mind insists on doing its work.  Traced in the geological recording of mental events (broadest thoughts and conscious intuitions, meditations), something of a meaningful conclusion, perhaps hidden, perhaps uneasily stepped around for a time, is present and accountable.

Dostoevsky quotes from John to begin The Brothers Karamazov, on the kernel of wheat falling to the ground.  What does it mean, by itself or in context of Dostoevsky's story?  Why did I put something like it in a passage from A Hero For Our Time just after the guy has met the girl?  In conventional narrative arcs, they get together at the end, so why put in that harbinger of an end that is unsatisfactory as far as resolving what appears to be the plot?  (Why or how could such a fellow be, in his right mind, thinking such deep thoughts and not with utter pretension?  Well, college age, sigh, maybe the writer can get away with it.)

Great Literature aspires.  It offers a philosophical conclusion, however ambiguous it might seem initially to the eye, and perhaps never quite explicitly discernible.  Take Anna Karenina.  It's there somewhere.

Later on, what sprung out unconsciously becomes clearer.  For one writer, it might go something like this, not to bore anyone:  only after a full season, when that kernel of wheat does fall to the ground and die, then it will be on its way to bringing forth fruit;  only after the individual becomes finally 'grown-up,' finally privy to the great illusions of separate distinctive Self, finally aware of the falseness of the Ego, only after a great purifying offered up by slowly fallen wisdom through the course of life's journey, only then would one really be capable and ready for the great relationship.

I wonder, if you take any thinker, is there not a sense of fatalism within.  Lincoln was a fatalistic sort, and perhaps oddly, through long thought processes, he took the things that had happened to him, observed them, and made some sort of poetic sense of them;  and then we see the sense of meaning he distilled from life in his great thoughts of the meaning of a nation and government of the people, by the people and for the people, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  It is necessary for us to submit our own egos, as much as we might like the economic power of a valuable commodity (such as slaves), to a fair national sense of the greater good, right and wrong.  The meanings taken from one aspect of life may indeed have a broader and proper applicability.  And that is what makes writing worth it, in the end, the discovery of those touchstones.

And so there is Levin, Tolstoy's stand-in, out there scything at wheat with his peasants in the summer sun, as if he is engaged in the very act of recording his thoughts, or what you might call thoughts, but maybe which are potentially the 'space between thoughts.'  (The author recording the thoughts of a man who is thinking, the thoughts of a man who is thinking also about what he is thinking.)  As the writer is recording his thoughts, here caught in the lens of art, he is showing us the methods by which he works, which then become, at least the harbingers of, the deeper more conclusive thoughts to render.  (It is appropriate that we find a fine very early example of stream of consciousness in Anna Karenina, the thoughts of Anna as she goes to the train station to her suicide.)  And maybe just in and of itself, the recording of thought is enough to be a great achievement, by itself, without need of any handed down conclusions.

Interestingly enough, the story of Anna Karenina is about what we do with our thoughts.  Do we take them seriously, at face value?  Or do we step back, seeking a deeper circumspection?  At face value everything is fine and good if our thoughts and mental conclusions about the state of things are good and happy, but what if they are not?  They have the potential to lead us to destruction, indeed.  But, on the other hand, if the thoughts themselves are bad and dark, if we are able to step back from them they are not so harmful.  And if we are in the habit of stepping back from our thoughts, finding space between them and relying more on deeper consciousness without its tendency to constantly label, we step perhaps toward a crucial enlightenment, content once again.  Anna the thinker is left to choose destruction, where Levin seems to take everything in stride and with some patience end up reasonably happy.  Particularly in later works, Tolstoy loved simple stories with a moral (as in 'the moral of the story is...'), and perhaps this is one of them as well.



It is a good feeling to find within an independent confirmation of the Buddha's wisdom, through your own math and calculations, through your own experience and reflection.  The world is enchanted with pleasure, and being part of the world that can happen to you too, before you see your own perpetual dissatisfaction with the outcomes of pleasure-seeking, the creation of more problems.  You want to understand clearly what you are, and then have a way to teach it, to whatever extent you can in whatever form it might take.   And then to finally figure out the root of unhappiness and dissatisfaction, just as the Buddha found, that is a moment of happiness.