An Ending

Last night I finished one of the longest, greatest novels that I have ever read, Leo Tolstoy's unforgettable War and Peace. Everything that can possibly be said about the book has already been done, so I'll spare the novice critique. All I will say is that I laughed, I cried and I really got to know the Rostovs, the Bolknoskys and the Bezukhovs. And right now I am experiencing a feeling of melancholy and regret, wishing that I did not have to say goodbye to my beloved friends and damning myself for reading the book as fast as I did, somehow hoping that my slower reading would have somehow postponed the inevitable.

One of the great threads in the novel is the conflict of life and to somehow defeat death so as to live on in eternal happiness. Towards the end of the book I was wishing that Prince Andrey would somehow discover this magic token so that we both could live together another day and continue to share our intimate secrets. When once our moments together were temporarily postponed by the clatter of an arriving subway car, now our time together is done, his life doomed by the shrapnel of an errant grenade, mine to be inadequately replaced by the next character who fails to reveal himself so completely to me.

Pierre, Natasha, Andrey and Nikolay:

I will never forget you.