“When you admit that life can be ruled by reason”…

“When you admit that life can be ruled by reason, the possibility for life is destroyed.”

Thus ends the first chapter of the brilliant second epilogue to Tolstoy’s masterpiece, War and Peace. What force pulls apart nations? Forges them together? What power moves a man to kill another man? The second epilogue is a very interesting essay on historical philosophy; but I think it also offers very interesting ideas that have nothing to do with power or government or war.

What force weaves two people together? What force tears them apart? What force brings them together again? Is it free will? Is it God? Is it some homogeneous combination of the two? Throughout the epilogue Tolstoy argues that the events of 1812 resulted not because of any great man or because of a special brilliance or genius, but because it simply had to happen. Not by one man’s will did men go to war and kill. Not by a brilliant tactitian or strategist was the war one, but by an innumerable series of events that had no resemblance to what was ordered by the generals.

Tolstoy talks all about the generals and the movements of armies, but for some reason he neglects to speak about all the threads of his story that had little to do with the army. The characters in his story could see into the future no more than we can. Their actions reflected what they believed would happen, and the things they did rarely managed to accomplish the goals they had in mind, but were in fact used toward ends which they could not comprehend at the time.

Events that seemingly destroyed their happiness at the moment turned out to be essential to ensuring their future happiness.

You can no more easily make someone love you than a general can make an army do such and such maneuver, winning such and such battle. When you examine it, when you wrestle with it, you realize that free will is the name history gives to irreducible causes. As Tolstoy says earlier in the epic:

” Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind. Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man only when he examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the same time, a large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements”

You can’t just ask why or how Natasha ended up with Pierre, you have to ask why. They didn’t end up with each other because of Pierre, they didn’t end up with each other because of Natasha; I would be willing to say that if we were able to ask tolstoy why Natasha and Pierre ended up together, we would be told, “Because they had to”.

So the question becomes not “What force moves life forward?” but, “Where do we go from here? Where is God taking me now? How can I best align my actions and my feeble heart with the only will that matters, the will that moves history forward?”

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Elegy for one fine collection

I bought a mac. Thank you, thank you; hold your applause. I am a fairly competent diagnostician when it comes to windows/linux. I am no programmer by any means, and I know people who fly right over my head, but I knew enough to fix what needed fixing, usually. However, it was getting to the point where I was doing more fixin’ than usin’.  So I gave in and bought a mac because I felt like taking a break from worrying too much about the technical side of things.

Now I am not naive enough to believe that with the buying of a mac all of your worries go away, which is why I am constantly paranoid about how many programs I have open and how much hard drive space I have. I want to keep as many things as I can on external drives. I was adding music to my ipod when it happened; Catastrophic failure. My Ipod was deleted. I thought I had it sufficiently backed up my music to my hard drive. Little did I know that all the backup copies skipped because of  a faulty cord.

I lost a lot of music.

I had a very, very decent Jazz collection. I had countless hours of Classical music. Gone. Goodbye. Two year’s work, deleted in a single keystroke.

Fear not, even amongst the burning, smokey, corpse filled remains of my ipod, there is hope. I shall rebuild. I must rebuild. Already the downloads have begun. Slowly but surely Mingus, Brubeck, Baker, Coltrane, Davis, Armstrong and the rest return to me. It will take time, but I am sure that I will come out the other end with an even better collection.

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Trouble in briefing-land?

Robert Gibbs has not had a good month. I lifted this transcript from Politico. Jack tapper and Gibbs get into it.

JT: Robert, two questions — one’s a housekeeping one. In the name of the transparency that you and the President herald so much, is there any way we could get the copies of the waivers that the OMB issues to allow certain Cabinet posts or deputy posts to be free of the ethics constraints you put up? And also the disclosure forms that your nominees put out that go to office of government ethics that somehow they are not able to email or put on the web, is there any way we can get copies of those?

RG: I will check. I don’t know how those forms are distributed.

JT: Based on listening to the president’s rhetoric, I’m sure this is something he would want to do.

RG: Well, knowing of your crystal clarity on his opinion, I’ll certainly check.

JT: He doesn’t believe in transparency?

RG: Did you have another more pertinent question?

JT: I think that’s fairly pertinent to your cabinet nominees and whether not they pay their taxes and whether not they have speaking fees with all sorts of industries you are supposed to regulate, I think that’s fairly pertinent, you don’t?

RG: Obviously, I do. And obviously the President does.

JT OK. A majority of the American people support blocking or making major changes to the stimulus bill, according to the Gallup poll. Are you worried you have lost the process of how the bill is received?

RG: Chuck?

Yikes

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