Reading, Reading...On War

The weekend had been madness. I was changing the game plan for one of the classes I teach this summer due to the lack of stock of a book on the reading list. So I have to move things around on the syllabus, re-write some handouts, and leaf through some 300 pages of reading of another book which we will be discussing this week. All that took me a day. So the gay studies class will read Michael Warner instead of this. The highlight of the weekend would be the 12-minute conversation on the cellphone with J, who had been running errands and hanging out with friends, while I was trying to make things smooth for the classes. So Russian lit seminar, we're still plowing through War and Peace. I managed to get past Book 2 and am on Book 3, p.950, over that big sumptuous piece of brownie at SI.

For an epic novel whose story line builds upon the war, I find War and Peace rarely breathes about moral conscience on bloodshed. It seem to delve quite a bit on man's free will and destiny. After going through almost 1000 pages of it, I get the idea that war can be a fortuitous event. It's almost like slow chess game. Myriads of causes (and motives) might have coincided to bring about what happened in war. Men who fought the war were no more than pawns on the chessboard (battlefield)--every man lives for himself, using his freedom and his whole being that he can at any moment perform or not perform an action, but so soon as he has done it, the action accomplished at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable, which belongs to history. Can we still say the action has a free significance or is it predestined?