passage: levin is spending time with his brother, he mows with the muzhiks and finds great joy, dolly’s life in the countryside, levin visits, then levin watches the peasants, wants a simple, pure life, but then sees dolly and decides not to

the part where levin is talking to his brother, where his brother accuses him of doing nothing for the Country. levin then goes on a rant of being motivated only by things that directly affect him. self interest. i think i’m similar to this, it’s so much already having to work with things in your micro environment, and like levin, i think so much of the rest of the world is out of my control or of no interest to me. we all suffer, we’re all dealt a certain fate. i know this isn’t the best way to approach humanity, but maybe if we all turned inward and worked on loving ourselves and just the basic, being kind to those around us and strangers, then we’d be ok. problem is we aren’t. we can’t let each other be. we’re constantly having to convince others that our way to deal with society is the best when we are all so different, how can we all be wedged into the same system and philosophy. but we are. i don’t know the solution. i know it’s not simple. i just know i don’t try as much to be a part of it because i don’t know how. i like the peace and calmness of my life. i like the people in it. i like caring for them, for myself, and i think that is all the capacity i have.​ it’s a lot already! i know i could try harder and others do. i’m grateful for those people but sometimes those people also think they know it all and fuck it all up. mainly talking about politics here. and maybe even people who mean to do well but don’t understand the big picture and repercussions enough. maybe we’re meant to just live in smaller communities. but i’m sure we’ll figure i out. but i’m just an ant in all this, not the queen bee. i’m not ender (from ender’s game). and if you haven’t read ender’s game (1 and 2) this is where you would have to had do so to understand this sentence. very james joycean of me. hah!

quote: Either you’re so undeveloped that you cannot see all that you could do, or you cannot give up your peace, your vanity, whatever, in order to do it.

and it was kind of funny to see levin go through the motions of wanting to change and then upon seeing kitty pass by in carriage (this is all in less than a 24 hour span) is relegated to abandoning all those hopes and dreams of a simpler, purer life, because he loves her so…

the part where levin was mowing and his whole body got into it, he lost track of time, had similarities to the murakami running book in which he does an ultra marathon and basically loses all track of his body and time, he becomes a machine. i don’t think i’ve ever pushed myself this hard… i just let my body and brain mentally collapse and stop. this is why i hate hiking. probably for the best. we can’t all be star athletes.

ok and then there is dolly, her and her kids, how unhappy she is, her husband kind of doing nothing for her. she focuses her source of happiness on her children, so much expectation of them, only to be brought up by something so small as her daughter sharing a cake with her son who was “wrongly” punished. not sure if this was a good lesson. and then at the end being so devastated that they were fighting and just being kids. also teaching them french… mothers… the nature of them, maybe should change. i mean parents in general, but especially mothers. but if everyone were like this would the human race just cease to exist?

quotes:

Sliced down with a succulent  sound and smelling of spice, the grass lay in high swaths.

… the strange mother-of-pearl shell of white, fleecy clouds…

today’s passage: mostly speaks of kitty on her time away in germany with her mom and her dad

faking it, aren’t we all? it’s really easy to trick yourself or convince yourself of things, especially when they are new. a lot of cool descriptive words and dialogue today, especially between kitty and varenka. I can relate to kitty, trying to get away from something, trying new things out and then finding that wasn’t who she is or wanted at all. we’ve all been there in our transitional or painful phases, but i’ve also been finding that just letting yourself feel what you want to feel has also been extremely liberating. we all need to kind of figure it out for ourselves so we can “take our place” in this world, however small or large that space is. small fish, big pond.

quote:

As definitely and as invariably a particle of water acquires the specific form of a snowflake in freezing, so each new person arriving at the spa was put at once into the place appropriate for him.

i’m going to start journaling about what i read, more so how i feel about it and less so events that happen and less of a synopsis.

today’s passages: largely about vronsky before a big horse race and then he goes to sees anna

story has progressed rather quickly in terms of their romance, very few scenes of them together up until this point, just internal thoughts pointing at what they mean to each other. i wish it was a little bit more smutty. lol but interesting technique, just telling us where the relationship is through the character’s thoughts.

i gasped when she told him she was pregnant. already?! we’re not even halfway through the book yet. is the rest of the book just going to be impending doom?

i enjoyed vronsky’s connection to his horse, described as not the most physically buff (hah! for lack of a better word), but seemingly human somehow, the little detail of how if she could talk, she would. how she stomped out of excitement but quieted down when he came near.

fave quote:

“Vronksy stroked her firm neck, straightened a strand of her mane that had fallen on the wrong side of her sharp withers, and put his face to her nostrils, taut and thin as a bat’s wing.”

going to write first and then talk to ai, tried to talk to grok today and it was just grossly wrong (new 4.1 update needs some updating? saying anna’s son had just come home from a gymnastics lesson, wtf lol) — anywho, switched to claude.

tri: i was definitely excited the whole time throughout this passage, but this analysis definitely makes a lot of sense in terms of the techniques used, short phrases when things become urgent, telling us directly they are not on the same page etc etc