Green astral

By Leo Tolstoy

"It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely perceptible attempts which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest might have been not the real thing. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been not the real thing. He tried to defend all those things to himself. And suddenly he felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend."

Why It Hits Home

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.”

Woolf was a master of capturing the fluid, drifting nature of human thought and memory. In this passage, she describes a coastal house left empty for years, showing how time and nature slowly wash over the physical spaces we leave behind.

"But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a thing dissolved in water, in the sky. The night folds itself as smoothly as a banner is folded; a solitary cheek finds at dawn the shell-pink on the marble of the brow.

Only inside the room, short though the night might be, there was a little world, a separate peace. Nothing broke it, nothing disturbed it. The world outside might throb and roar; the light might fade, the rain might fall; but within, the candle burned, the shadow slept."

In this scene, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky—weary, cynical, and grieving the loss of his wife—is traveling through the countryside when he encounters a massive, seemingly dead oak tree. The passage is a masterpiece of psychological realism, using nature to mirror the internal struggle between bitter resignation and the quiet, persistent pull of rebirth.

The Old Oak — War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

An old oak, many times larger than the birches which grew beside it, stood at the edge of the road. It was ten times as old as they, and its branches, broken long ago, with bark stripped off, were covered with old scars. With its huge, clumsy, asymmetrical, sprawling arms and fingers, it stood an old, stern, and scornful monster between the smiling birches. Only it refused to submit to the charm of spring, and would not see either spring or sunshine.

"Spring, love, happiness!" this oak seemed to say. "Are you not weary of the same stupid, senseless delusion? Always the same, and always a cheat! There is no spring, no sunshine, no happiness! Look at those starved, dead firs, always the same, and look at me, with my broken, torn fingers growing out of my back and ribs, where they grew—so I stand, and I do not believe in your hopes and your delusions."

Prince Andrei looked round at this oak several times as he passed it, as if he expected something from it. There were flowers and grass under the oak, but it stood among them as before, scowling, rigid, monstrous, and stubborn.

"Yes, the oak is right, a thousand times right," thought Prince Andrei. "Let others, the young, yield afresh to that delusion, but we know life—our life is over!"

A whole new sequence of thoughts, hopeless but mournfully pleasing, arose in his soul in connection with this oak. During this journey he seemed to review his whole life afresh, and arrived at the same old comforting and hopeless conclusion: that it was not for him to begin anything new, that he must live out his life, doing no harm, not troubling himself, and wanting nothing.