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willowJun 18, 2025

everything, including his ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, lose their shape and their hold on him, and he feels at sea, dissatisfied but unsure why. It isn’t even clear, at the end, whether he fails to understand his life, or whether he disapproves of what it has been, or whether he simply feels that something important has been left out. It is not at all clear why exactly it has all been so unsatisfactory. Perhaps what is really unsatisfactory is not his previous life, but the fact that he now is dying.

Ivan Is Unwell, Raymond Geuss, Who Needs A Worldview?, pg. 138

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Maybe he was wrong at the end and the great obsession with getting ahead in the world, good food and drink and sex, which motivated him in his twenties, was really the right way to life his life. Maybe this correct insight was just covered over by the length of years, or he could no longer grasp its truth when he came to die. Perhaps he simply got too old to enjoy the pleasures of a man of twenty. Or perhaps his view of life at age twenty isn’t “right,” but it is no more wrong than the views he develops on his deathbed. Or perhaps it is just the case that what suits one in one’s healthy twenties will not necessarily suit one equally well in one’s sixties if they are spent in ill health or in the senility of one’s seventies. Last words and last thoughts are not invariably those most replete with human wisdom. If this seems to be the case, it is because unmemorable ones are nor remembered.

willow @dreary.dev

To return to Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy writes that at the end of his life Ivan Ilyich was able to tell himself the story of his life. He told it as a story of failure, although he can never really articulate the reason it was a failure. The point of Ivan Ilyich’s story, though, it has always seemed to me, is not so much that at the end for the first time he can tell the story of his life as a whole; the whole story suggests that this was something he could always do, had he wanted to; it is just that his narrative, like his life, would have been conventional, banal, and boring. His life was trop comme il faut to be at all interesting. Neither is the main point that he now sees his life differently and clearly, although that is what he (and perhaps Tolstoy, too) might think. Rather, the shocking thing at the end is that Ivan understands that the narrative does not matter. In the end, all this does not matter. This does not mean that at age twenty “all this” did not matter to Ivan Ivan Is Unwell 141 Ilyich. Since, to repeat, Ivan does not exist and never existed except as a literary creation of Tolstoy, the only reasonable meaning one can give to this question is whether Tolstoy represents “all this” as mattering to him. He says it did, so it did (unless I, as reader, have some overwhelmingly strong reason I can give for disagreeing with Tolstoy on this point). Nor that “all this” did not matter to him at age forty; it probably did, although the actual content of “all this” had probably changed for him between the ages of twenty and forty. That is all there is: sometimes things mean something; then they don’t; sometimes observers can hazard a guess about “causal” connections; sometimes they cannot. Is it obvious that a person’s judgment must be sharpest and most correct at the moment of death? Even if he is wasting away and losing his faculties?

willowMar 16, 2025

and why give present me interpretative authority? maybe old me knew something i’ve since forgotten

June 18, 2025 at 6:48 PM