On Reading War and Peace

Two weeks ago I finished War and Peace. How interesting, right? Well stick with me, there’s a point to this. Two weeks ago I reached the last page and put down a book roughly the size (and weight) of a brick, which wasn’t a big deal. It’s not like I haven’t read long books before, and to be quite frank, I don’t find it altogether impressive that a person can (or does) read a long book. Reading War and Peace is not more impressive than reading five or so three to four hundred page novels. It’s not really more impressive than reading one. What I mean is that the act of reading the text, the simple gesture of picking it up and reading the first words, the last words, and all of the thousands of words in between is not impressive on its own. So why am I writing about reading this behemoth?

To understand why I’m writing about it, you have to understand what War and Peace is to a literary scholar and a writer, it is the holy grail of literature, the Everest, the white whale. Pick a cliché and that is what reading War and Peace is. It’s something we all know we should do but few of us actually undertake. It sits on our bookshelves, perpetually existing as “my next book.” For me, it represented years of procrastinating. It represented years of being a lousy student, a lazy student, even a lazy writer and scholar. Reading it was something I felt I had to do to prove to myself that I was capable of self-discipline. I suppose it hovered in front of me as some sort of validating exercise. If I could read War and Peace I could know that I wasn’t a complete lazy waste of brains. If I could finish it, I would have tangible proof that by being sick and unable to work and having to be home all day watching my dog bite the couch and hump his bed, I wasn’t completely wasting my life, watching my twenty-fourth year float by day by day while I sat aside and watched. I would have proof that POTS hadn’t beaten me and maybe, just maybe I would have hope that I could beat it. But by the time I closed it and picked up my next book (Macbeth if you’re interested followed thereafter by Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper), I realized that I had been wrong.

This week we had to make the decision to postpone our wedding. With the original date now a little more than three months away, we could no longer get by just hoping that I would be better in time to get married, able to stand up long enough to take my vows and kiss the woman I love. The subject of postponement had come up before, and every time I had dismissed it outright. “No. Absolutely not. I will be better. I am going to be fine by October.” With every day that passed, bringing October 4^th closer and closer I knew that the likelihood of that being true was diminished. Every time something having to do with wedding planning came up, Becky got the same sad look in her eyes, and it became clear that what was supposed to be a stressful but happy time in our lives had become a worry, a sad reminder of what our lives have become as a result of an obscure, poorly understood, autonomic nervous system disorder that leaves me a shell of the man I actually am. I am trapped inside of a body that will not do what my brain wants it to do, and this week I had to admit that to myself and to my fiancée. I had to tell her, honestly, that I didn’t think I would be okay by October.

All along the worst feeling has been the sense that I’m letting her down. When I put that ring on her finger, it was with the promise to take care of her, to make her happy, and to always, always push to make sure that her dreams came true. It sounds corny, and it is corny, but it is true. When I proposed, when I asked her mother and her sisters if I could propose, it was with that promise, to make her happy.

Postponing the wedding felt, at first, like an admission of defeat. It felt like I was giving up, but there comes a point in every one of our lives, multiple points really, where we have to be able to step outside of our selves, put our egos and our desires aside, and look at things honestly and objectively. And looking at this situation honestly, there was only one decision that could be made. We had to postpone.

A wedding is supposed to be a happy event, and dammit I want to dance at my wedding. Granted, I’ll need about five glasses of wine before I’ll agree to do so, but the point is that I want to. And right now, standing up long enough to get a drink of water can wear me out. We knew that if we were going to make this call, we had to do it now before it was too late. We figured it was smarter to make the decision now and risk me being healthy than not make it and risk me being sick. And I hope I’m healthy on October 4^th. I hope we can walk the dog through the park and laugh about how we should be getting married. I really do. I hope I’m healthy tomorrow. But I can’t guarantee it.

So what does any of this have to do with War and Peace? It’s simple really. POTS is destroying me. It has taken from me the physical things I love to do, my ability to work, my physical well being, and now my wedding. It has completely and utterly destroyed my life as I knew it. But, and this is a big but, it cannot and will not take away everything from me, and reading War and Peace was my way of taking something back. It was my way of climbing some sort of mountain, gaining some sort of small victory. I saw reading that book as something that would symbolize the chip on my shoulder and my refusal to let this thing keep me from doing something.

But ultimately, reading War and Peace didn’t feel like that. It was a good book, and I’m glad I read it. But it didn’t change me or my situation. The next morning I still couldn’t walk around the block until I’d taken my five pills. I still had to lay down afterward. There were still points in the day where I got angry and a little depressed….but you try watching the Doctor Phil show or Judge Judy and not thinking that maybe, just maybe, there are some real scum buckets out there who might deserve something a little more than you….sorry. Where was I? Ah yes… we still had to postpone the wedding.

So I took out the laptop and did what I do every day now, I continued work on my novel, and I realized that I’m now ¾ of the way through it. I continued working with the Spanish textbook I bought online, and when Becky got home we talked a little en español. I checked a few things off of my list of goals. I did what I could.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m happy with my situation. I can’t write fluffy stuff all the time just so my mom doesn’t worry about my mental health. If you want to know the truth, this sucks. This sucks big time. I hate it. I get angry with it. I get frustrated. I get depressed. I lose my temper. I brood from time to time. But you don’t have to worry about me because the one thing I don’t do is let myself get lost in it. Every time I get stuck in one of the ruts I step back and look at it all objectively. It’s the hardest thing, in my opinion, for a human being to do. It’s the reason we have wars, arguments, racism, classism, any other ism. People don’t want to step back and look at things as objectively as they can, but it is, again in my humble opinion, the only way to achieve any form of release from the struggles life constantly throws at us.

Objectively, reading War and Peace is not much of an accomplishment. But subjectively…it was important to me in its own way.