March 15, 2008: Tolstoy on Happiness & One-ness in Marriage - 0 Comments

"Vronsky, meanwhile, despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires."

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"Only then did he understand clearly for the first time what he had not understood when he had led her out of the church after the wedding. He understood not only that she was close to him, but that she no longer knew where she ended and he began. He understood it by the painful feeling of being split which he experienced at that moment. He was offended at first, but in that same instant he felt that he could not be offended by her, that she was him. In the first moment he felt like a man who, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, turns with vexation and a desire for revenge to find out who did it, and realizes that he has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry with and he must endure and ease the pain."

- Tolstoy (trans. P&V), Anna Karenina, 1878