Living Inside the Whirlwind

I have been quiet lately and it's partly a function being busy -- at work, which has been more demanding than usual, and with my second job, trying to buy an apartment. But I think I have been also been stunned into silence a bit. Horrible news from Colorado -- a dragging, a school shooting -- superseded by horrible new from Pennsylvania -- another school shooting, in Amish country, no less. A colleague's wife gave birth to 3-pound twins, one of whom developed complications (beyond the mere fact of weighing 3 pounds, which tends to make daily life difficult) Her struggle for life in the neo-natal ICU is documented on a Web page updated daily. Shortly before the twins' premature birth, another colleague abruptly died at the not-so-ripe age of 60.

In short, people have real problems. So what am I doing here with my little complaints?

To complain is to live; adversity is what makes us real and gives impetus to plot in fiction. Part of the problem of imagining paradise is that it would be so boring. A perfect little world -- oh, and it never ends. How incredibly tedious. I have noticed that the more fortunate people are the more ridiculous the things they find to find fault with, as if the impulse to complain is uncontrollable and searches for an object, however flimsy.

I realize to my dismay that I am channeling Tolstoy; I have spent the better part of the last month reading "War & Peace" and this is it what can do to a person: make you write paragraphs like the one above. But the experience has been worth the damage to my prose style, to live inside Tolstoy's mind for a while, with his god's-eye view of the human condition and sometimes amazing insightfulness.

When I read one particularly horrible detail of the Amish-school shootings, how the gunman fastened the legs of the girls so they could not flee, I suddenly found myself thinking of the passage I had just read, when Pierre, at that point a prisoner of the French and accused of being an arsonist, is taken to what he thinks is his execution and sees the men ahead of him getting shot:

The convicts went up to the post, stopped there, and while the sacks were being brought, they looked dumbly around them, as a wild beast at bay looks at the approaching hunter. One of them kept on crossing himself, the other scratched his back and worked his lips into the semblance of a smile. The soldiers with hurrying fingers bandaged their eyes, put the sacks over their heads, and bound them to the post.

A dozen sharpshooters, with muskets, stepped out of the ranks with a fine, regular tread, and halted eight paces from the post. Pierre turned away not to see what was coming. There was a sudden bang and rattle that seemed to Pierre louder than the most terrific clap of thunder, and he looked round. There was a cloud of smoke, and the French soldiers, with trembling hands and pale faces, were doing something by the pit. The next two were led up. These two, too, looked at everyone in the same way, with the same eyes, dumbly, and in vain, with their eyes only begging for protection, and plainly unable to understand or believe in what was coming. They could not believe in it, because they only knew what their life was to them, and so could not understand, and could not believe, that it could be taken from them.