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willow
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
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willow
willowMar 16, 2025
and why give present me interpretative authority? maybe old me knew something i’ve since forgotten