War, Peace, Fantasy, Truth

Listened to War and Peace last night and again on the way to work this morning. Powerful episode leading up to the death of Petya, and that led me to brood darkly (while making the cloudy drive up I-95) on the human cost of war, the senselessness, the tragedy of it that so many people have pointed to in despair over the years--and it is always there to point to since war is a practice we can never seem to abandon. For a 19thC writer, Tolstoy is not notably sentimental; indeed, his famous "objectivity" often denies us many of the easier fictional satisfactions--such as the rousing enjoyment of heroic deeds. Petya's death is stupid and meaningless, and it comes about explicitly because of the fiction of valor and "heroism" to which he is so hopelessly in thrall. He's a boy, a boy with a sword and a gun, seeking a boy's idea of glory. And the great sadness here is that he is probably closer to the rule than to the exception; we fight wars with boys--that is, boys fight wars--and we fill their heads with nonsense so they will be ready to lay down their lives. In the novel, Tolstoy uses the power of sentiment to make us feel the loss of Petya's boyish life keenly. The older soldier/friend Denisov recalls Petya's love of sweets and the cache of raisins he has brought with him to the battlefield, and then he, Denisov, bursts into a howl of grief. Though there have been many battles in the many hundreds of pages preceding this moment, we have previously seen nothing of the kind, no outpouring of emotion on this order. The effect is all the more powerful in light of Tolstoy's habitual restraint.

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Literature often envelopes us in a comforting bubble of fantasy; we enjoy things we would never enjoy in real life, including even the rendering of the dark facts of death and destruction. There are moments, though, when the bubble bursts, when we stop thinking about fiction as fiction and start thinking about the world. Suddenly you're not reading a battle scene but thinking about real battles, real soldiers, real deaths (in this case Iraq was in my mind), as if the real non-fictional truth were suddenly laid bare like a rock that had been covered by earth.

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Lately, we have let Nicholas watch Star Wars, bowing to the fact that several of the other boys at pre-school have seen it a zillion times, own all the toys, and talk about it incessantly. It's an exciting adventure, a simple, powerful story about the battle between good and evil, with a heroic boy at the center. We fast-forward through some of the more violent scenes, but it's the first thing we've ever let him watch where people fire guns at one another, ships blow up, and so on. Last night he was enjoying the explosions of starfighters in one of the battle scenes when it finally (we're on our third or fourth viewing) occurred to him to ask "What happens to the people when the ships blow up?" When I explained that the people also blow up, Nicholas let out a wide-eyed, heavy, serious "Oh," full of the gravity of the realization. The movie kept going, we kept watching, and the moment passed, but it gave me a serious pang. He's five years old now, and learning more and more about the world that's out there--as opposed to the semi-fictional bubble in which we raise young children. That means he's going to start finding out the things we really do to one another.