There is today, here, a pervasive sense of smallness and insignificance in the Stone-household. Prompted by multiple desires, I have been spending the first few days of my Spring Break, not in Colorado or New Mexico where there is snow-aplenty; no, I am doing a bit of what one might refer to as spring cleaning. In actuality, Julie and I are exploring the option of selling the house, and when/if we do this will expedite the process considerably when the time comes to move.
Coinciding with the cleaning of the house, I have spent the better part of most of these days in solitude, and being incapable of thoughtlessly spending time alone, I have been engaged in some form of spiritual clean-up as well.
My students and I have been studying a book which I fell in love with over this last summer. The Death of Ivan Ilych, a wonderful, short work of Leo Tolstoy (not stereotypically Russian in this way), tells the tale of the life and death of Ivan, showing motivations, relationships and most poignant on this reading, the futility of what consumes the majority of one' earthly existence.
One line in particular has stood out and been repeated to me for the past week or more: "In the dining-room, where was the bric-a-brac clock that Ivan Ilych had been so delighted at buying." I have been haunted by these lines since I reread them while preparing to teach the novel. There is nothing profound on the surface, but the subtext is disturbing, particularly as I rummage through the rooms of stuff that Julie and I have accumulated in our short lifetimes.
The scene in question takes place after Pyotr has begrudgingly gone to pay his respects to Ivan' wife upon his foreseen demise. The wife has attempted in vain to show grief, but she is too worried about financial arrangements to shed true tears, and Pyotr is plotting his way out of the house in order to attend an already begun card game that bodes much more excitement and enjoyment than reminiscing over the almost already forgotten dead man. It is only in passing from one room, filled with Ivan' former possessions that he glances but a moment at the clock upon the mantle (at least that is where it is as I imagine the scene). The moment is brief, and it would pass as unnoticeable to me as reader had he not referenced Ivan' delight. With this word I cannot pass quickly by any longer; it is no longer just a clock, it is his clock, something important to him.
There are no thought of morbidity on my mind necessarily, but I am as equally haunted by the things surrounding me in this house right now as I am by those words written a over one hundred years ago. It is as if the guitars and books, dishes and cd's are crashing in upon me. I love some of these things, they bring me delight, but they are as forgettable upon my demise as Ivan' clock.
Tolstoy is hardly the example by which I would like to fashion my life, he appears to have been a mean s.o.b. by the time of his death, but he also seems to have grasped the truth of Solomon' vanity of existence. How does one live like that? Tolstoy chose to, at 81, leave his family in the middle of the night to live as a pauper (he caught pneumonia and died shortly thereafter), and I suppose that is an option, but I imagine I will continue to wrestle with it for awhile before it comes to that.
