Vronsky, meantime, notwithstanding the complete realization of all that he had desired so long, was not entirely happy. He soon began to feel that the accomplishment of his desires was only a small portion of the mountain of pleasure which he had anticipated. This realization now proved to him the eternal error made by men who imagine their happiness lies in the accomplishment of their desires.
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Why would accomplishing desires not deliver the happiness one imagined? Because expectations exceed actuality – either expectations are too high, or reality is too mundane – and thus, the object of desire is not as fulfilling as one imagined it would be. If the expectations were unrealistically high, they were bound to set one up for disappointment. If the expectations were moderate, maybe the coveted prize nevertheless failed to meet them. The fault here is either in the thing one desires – it isn’t good, though you thought it would be – or in the expectations – the object of desire is good, but you thought it’d be way better.
Why would this happen? One reason is ignorance, imperfect knowledge. Until you actually undertake something, you don’t know how it really is. Glimpses from outside are always mirages, charades; the viewer is, if anything, even more ignorant than a total outsider, who at least is untouched by a distortion put up for his consumption.
Glimpses from skimming the surface aren’t too much better I think, especially when it’s something or someone you want to like, or think you do. When you don’t know someone or something, and you have a preconceived high opinion of it, it’s only too easy to fill up the gaps with your image of what you want it to be – a halo effect. And, of course, most of us tend not to reveal ourselves at the outset, thereby giving a different picture from reality, usually a much better one. Familiarity breeds contempt, ignorance shields illusions. The less one knows about something, the more loveable it is. With knowledge, light falls in the corners, revealing flaws.
But there’s another cause – where the fault lies neither in the thing itself, nor in my expectation of it, but in myself – in putting too much of myself into my expectations.
His ideas about marriage were therefore essentially different from those held by the majority of his friends, for whom it was only one of innumerable social affairs; for Levin it was the most important act of his life, whereon all his happiness depended.
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
To make a single thing the bedrock of one’s existence casts a huge burden upon it, and creates expectations extremely difficult to live up to. Howsoever delightful, I wonder if any one thing can ever constitute an entire universe. It’s like living on a single dish – even if you don’t get sick of it, you won’t be very healthy on such a diet. Not surprisingly, those who do make one aspect of their lives their entire existence aren’t usually healthy specimens of humanity – fundamentalists, conspiracy theorists, and bores.
Usually though, you do get sick of it, as it begins to pall on you, all the more so if you pin everything on it. The fault might be in oneself, in the hedonistic treadmill that gets accustomed to a high as the new base level and demands higher highs. Or in the object of desire, its marginal utility diminishing with increasing familiarity – the fifteenth chocolate doesn’t taste as good as the first one. And sometimes, it’s just novelty – the newest toy is the favourite, but only for a brief while.
And then there’s the case that this is simply how a person is wired. That it is not accomplishment, but accomplishing that provides pleasure, a sort of satisfaction in perennial dissatisfaction.
It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again. The never-satisfied man is so strange; if he has completed a structure, then it is not in order to dwell in it peacefully, but in order to begin another. I imagine the world conqueror must feel thus, who, after one kingdom is scarcely conquered, stretches out his arms for others.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Disappointment or happiness (in this specific context) is an outcome that ensues from a choice. What precedes that choice, and shapes it, is desire, or, to use a stronger word, passion. It’s hard to pinpoint any one particular theme a book like Anna Karenina is about, revolving as it does around so much – but if I had to pick one, I’d think it’d be passion, though what precisely about passion is difficult to say.
Definitely not the hackneyed idea of chasing one’s passion at all costs – but not simply the opposite, either. It’s more to do with the nature of passion, and the cost it entails. One kind is a raging, tempestuous, passion, one for which a man can give up his ambition and career, and a woman her son and the opinion of society. And another kind, a more sedate, slow one, even unsure of itself, devoid of the flash and bang of the other, nor possessing its extreme highs and lows, but not, for that reason, any weaker or less genuine.
One of them makes for an engaging story – and not surprisingly the title of the book; the other, a relatively dull, meandering account, closer to reality – and not surprisingly either, closely related to the author’s own life. Despite what one might think, the extremities of a passion don’t relate to its strength or durability, in the same way that the intensity of a lion’s roar isn’t a measure of its strength.
And the costs too, of following a passion. It makes for a nice story to read about someone staking everything for that on which they have set their heart, and winning it. What you have here is instead something quite different. Not a case of risking everything and losing – far more common though this must be than the case of risking and winning, it is still one where you can comfort yourself with the debatable consolation that it’s better to try and fail than to not try at all. And you can, after all, pick up the pieces and move on to the next thing.
He looked at her as a man looks at a flower which he has plucked and which has faded, and he finds it hard to recognize the beauty for the sake of which he has plucked it and despoiled it.
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
It’s another matter though, when you do get the thing you want, and it turns out to be “only a small portion of the mountain of pleasure which [you] had anticipated”. And having kept so much of themselves into it, making it their whole life – literally a matter of life and death in this case – what you end up with is a sort of ‘winner’s curse‘. Just as the winner of an auction might win the object only to discover he paid a price more than what it was worth (after all, why did the others bid lower?), so too here.
He is forever quite close to the goal and the same moment at a distance from it; he now discovers that what it is that makes him unhappy, because now he has it, or because he is this way, is precisely what a few years ago would have made him happy if he had had it then, whereas then he was unhappy because he did not have it.
The Unhappiest One, Soren Kierkegaard
Sometimes, the thing one wants is a poisoned chalice, and its fulfillment a Pyrrhic victory, a ‘victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat’. It seems to be all the more likely the stronger the passion – strong to the point of blind recklessness, both because one is likelier to win now that they’ve made their whole life about this single issue and put their entire being into it, and because, blinded as they are, they’re unlikely to ask if the juice is worth the squeeze. That whose lack was earlier the cause of unhappiness, its presence now is the cause of unhappiness.
Such passion, stirring and tragic as it might be, is one step removed from idiocy – particularly in the eyes of a dispassionate observer. The one swept along the tides of the current, is no doubt, powerfully moved, justifiably so – but the one watching from the shore, I think, sees a farce, not a tragedy. One view of Romeo and Juliet, for instance, is of a profoundly moving story of true love that makes the ultimate sacrifice. Put less ornately however, simply stating the bald facts, it comes across slightly differently. It is the story of a teenage crush. Two kids meet for the first time on Sunday, crush hard on each other, marry the very next day, and are dead by Wednesday, before they can grow out of it.
You could argue the reason for this harsh divergence is that beauty lies only in the eye of the beholder, and a passion is inexplicable to anyone but the one in the arena. For those outside, it is only a mystery, what there is about such a thing that could move someone so, let alone drive them to make their entire life revolve around it, especially if it’s something unrelatable like stamps or manga or anime. An apocryphal story about Pythagoras (of Pythagoras’ Theorem fame), who venerated beans (believing humans and beans originated from the same source), for instance, claims that he died when he refused to escape a building set on fire by attackers, because it would mean running through and damaging a field of beans. It might seem incredibly stupid and unrelatable to care that much about beans, but is Pythagoras really so different from a Romeo or an Anna Karenina?
Others can’t comprehend the passion, but they do affect it – it is, in fact, their very incomprehension that’s behind the effect they have. When someone can’t comprehend something, they’re unlikely to be sympathetic to it. And when it’s something they haven’t done themselves – particularly something they’ve not done because of fear of the consequences – they’re more likely to be hostile to it.
In the face of this lack of understanding, or even hostility, one chooses, either to pay the price for a passion and be damned, or to abandon it and continue to play along and live up to expectations, as one has done so far. What’s interesting and beautiful is how Tolstoy shows just how many different combinations of outcomes can ensue from this.
At one end you have a woman who defies conventions and expectations to abandon a husband and child for a lover, and suffers for it. The husband who, even while aware of realities, is more interested in keeping up appearances and safeguarding his image, suffers in his own way. And the lover who, though paying his own heavy price by sacrificing his ambition, is judged far more leniently than the woman, and is scarcely condemned. Appearances seem to matter more than reality – in fact, to have a reality of their own, for so long as it is a dalliance hidden away, the reaction is amusement, encouragement. When things are in the open though – which is to say, when someone is tired of pretense and keeping up appearances, and wants appearances to conform to reality rather than vice versa, then so-called friends from earlier times turn their backs. And there is gender at work too – for much the same actions, a woman suffers, while her brother is unscathed.
And yet, the other story is also of a passion, but of one that, so far from defying tradition, embraces it. A ‘sober’ passion, that more or less follows conventions, which, though it has its ups and downs, is far less volatile. It settles down to a comfortable, if humdrum reality, neither making nor demanding stupendous sacrifices, and more than anything else, avoids making itself out to be the be-all and end-all of existence.
Tolstoy uses his book to put across his belief in the superiority of tradition over modernity, in every sphere. Of the country over Petersburg, of conventional economic management and political bodies over new-fangled ones, and of Levin’s passion, that, guided by and expressed through tradition, culminates in happiness, as opposed to Anna’s, reckless in its defiance and self-consuming in its self-obsession, finding only sorrow and death. One needn’t accept it as a general truth – and Tolstoy himself in his work illustrates with enough examples it isn’t always so, but as a possibility to acknowledge, and sometimes a plausible one.
In his Confession, written shortly after Anna Karenina, Tolstoy expounds further on this, what is clearly his pet theme. He writes how his life has been meaningless, how he has accomplished nothing, how he and his ilk wrote and pontificated loftily, sitting on perches pretending to teach without the slightest idea of what it was they supposedly taught, all in a quest for money and fame and gratification. Unable to live on in ignorance, lacking the will for self-destruction, shunning hedonism, he describes how he dragged out a pointless existence. And this from the man who (apart from other things) wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, each of which a work that, if someone did nothing in his life other than write it, theirs would still be more than a life well lived. From his reasoned, articulate and quite relatable travails, Tolstoy does seem to find some sort of solace through a – rather unrelatable and abstruse – leap of faith into a kind of tradition and religion, the theme of which is quite evident in the story of Levin.
Finally, what holds for passion holds for everything else too, even what might seem the opposite of passion, ‘duty’. Everything, after all, has a price. A line I first read in Agatha Christie decades back has stuck with me – “Take what you want and pay for it, says God”. The pursuit of a passion or a duty or an ideal is notable because you have to pay more for it, since they usually are more valuable, and because one overvalues them since it’s harder to be objective about a thing’s worth when one is smitten, which means you often end up with the winner’s curse.
And this idea brings me to my favourite video game, Assassin’s Creed. The creed of the Assassins is “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
“Where other men blindly follow the truth, remember nothing is true. Where other men are limited by morality or law, remember, everything is permitted.” I remember that’s how I first interpreted the line too – a not unreasonable interpretation in the context of a game you literally assassinate hundreds of people with your hidden blade, spewing blood left and right.
But to blindly accept this is itself a paradox, if nothing is true. And to simply obey equally contradictory, if everything is permitted. “For if nothing is true, then why believe anything? And if everything is permitted… why not chase every desire?”… “It might be that this idea is only the beginning of wisdom, and not its final form.“
A reminder to shun bad faith, not to hand over one’s agency to others. If nothing is true, I mustn’t outsource my thinking to another. If everything is permitted, I have to act myself. To say that nothing is true is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile and that we must be the shepherds of our civilization. To say that everything is permitted is to understand that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious of tragic.
And finally, in a 180° turn, you see that, far from being a grant of permission, the Creed is a warning – not unlike, I think, Anna Karenina.
“The Creed of the Assassin Brotherhood teaches us that nothing is forbidden to us. Once, I thought that meant we were free to do as we would. To pursue our ideals, no matter the cost. I understand now. Not a grant of permission. The Creed is a warning. Ideals too easily give way to dogma. Dogma becomes fanaticism. No higher power sits in judgement of us. No supreme being watches to punish us for our sins. In the end, only we ourselves can guard against our obsessions. Only we can decide whether the road we walk carries too high a toll.”