Mind and feeling
Leo Tolstoy
And what then
Leo Tolstoy (Russia · 1828–1910) — And what then.
What actually happened?
In late autumn 1910, at eighty-two, Tolstoy slipped away before dawn from the estate where he had lived most of his life and boarded a train. A few days later he fell ill on the way and was carried into the stationmaster's house at Astapovo, where he died ten days after leaving home. The question he had written down in A Confession more than thirty years before had never let him go.
After the two great books
War and Peace took about six years and Anna Karenina more than four. With both finished he had nothing left to prove as a writer, and that is exactly when the crisis came.
The hardest stretch sometimes comes right after the biggest thing you have ever finished.
Thinking of a rope at the best of times
He writes that he was not yet fifty, with a loving wife, good children, a thriving estate and a famous name. Yet he hid a cord from himself and stopped taking a gun out shooting, in case he used them.
The person who seems to lack nothing is the one who finds it hardest to say they feel empty.
He wrote those years down
In A Confession he set out how he got stuck, whom he looked at and which ways out he tried, without sparing himself. A vague misery only takes a shape you can see once it is written.
Write your recent low in three lines: when it started, what makes it worst, what you are avoiding.
How do I use it today?
This week, take something you recently finished and write down what you actually want now that it is done. If you cannot write it, hold off before starting the next thing.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
Only once you have done it all does the hardest question arrive.
The man who hid the rope seemed to have everything.
Answer 'what for' before you take on the next thing.