War And Peace

In the burnt-out ruins of Moscow Pierre had passed through degrees of hardship and deprivation that tested a man to the limit, but, because of his strong constitution and good health, which he had taken for granted until now, and especially because the privations had come upon him so gradually he couldn’t have said when they had started, he was able to stand the strain not only with something to spare, but with real pleasure. And it was now that he attained the peace of mind, the feeling of being at ease with himself, that he had been struggling vainly to achieve for so long. He had spent so much of his life casting around in all directions for the kind of tranquillity and self-certainty that had impressed him so much in the soldiers at Borodino. He had sought for it in philanthropy, freemasonry, a dissipated life in high society, wine, heroic deeds of self-sacrifice, and romantic love for Natasha. He had sought it through the power of thought, and all his struggles and various experiments had ended in frustration. And now without noticing it he had gained that inner peace and harmony simply through the horror of death and hardship together with what he had observed in Karatayev. Those ghastly moments he had lived through during the execution seemed to have blotted out of his imagination and his memory once and for all a whole series of worrying thoughts and anxious feelings that had once seemed so important. No thoughts now about Russia, the war, politics or Napoleon. None of this seemed to matter any more; it was not his responsibility, and his was not to sit in judgement. ‘Russia, warm weather – they don’t go together,’ he would say to himself, repeating Karatayev’s words, which he found strangely reassuring. His plans for killing Napoleon, all his cabbalistic calculations and his ideas about the beast of the Apocalypse now seemed senseless and positively ludicrous. His bitterness towards his wife, and the fear of having his name dragged through the mud, now seemed not just petty – they were hilarious. What did it matter to him if that woman chose to go away somewhere and lead the kind of life that appealed to her? What did it matter to anybody – least of all him – whether or not they found out that this prisoner’s name was Count Bezukhov?

Nowadays he often remembered his conversation with Prince Andrey, and he completely agreed with his friend, though with some slight distortion of his meaning. Prince Andrey had thought, and said, that happiness exists only in a negative sense, and he had said so with more than a touch of bitterness and irony, as if he was saying something else besides: that all our instinctive strivings towards positive happiness were implanted only for us to be let down and tormented by them. But Pierre recognized the truth of the basic idea without having to qualify it. Pierre now saw the absence of suffering and the satisfaction of our basic needs, followed up by freedom to choose an occupation, or lifestyle, as the highest and most dependable form of human happiness. It was only here and now that Pierre had fully appreciated for the first time in his life the enjoyment of eating when you are hungry, drinking when you are thirsty, sleeping when you are tired, keeping warm when it is cold and talking to a fellow creature when you feel like talking and you want to hear men’s voices. Through deprivation Pierre now saw the satisfaction of his basic needs – good food, cleanliness and freedom – as the ultimate happiness, and the choice of an occupation or lifestyle, now that this choice was so restricted, seemed such a simple matter that he forgot that a surfeit of luxury takes all the pleasure out of satisfying our basic needs, and maximum freedom in the choice of occupation, which had been provided for him through education, wealth and his position in society, makes the actual choice of an occupation extraordinarily difficult, because it destroys the need and desire for any such thing.

Pierre now dreamt of nothing but his coming freedom, though in years to come he would think and talk about that month of incarceration with much enthusiasm, recalling all the intensely pleasurable sensations that were now gone for ever, and especially the complete peace of mind and inner freedom that he had known only at that time.