metaphorically speaking

Sorry, further thoughts on War & Peace. Today my brilliant teacher brought up an interesting concept about the main characters in this book, a little group consisting of Pierre, Andrei, Marya, and Natasha. He noted that they are constantly, often painfully and unexpectedly, undergoing a process of death and rebirth, death and rebirth. Metaphorically speaking. They revive with love and realizations of the good in life, they die with disappointment, heartache, and frustration at the vices of men. My teacher went through the characters, and labeled them according to the life they were living, being classified either as "dead" or "alive". Later I wondered whether I was dead, alive, or experiencing a rebirth. Something to think about.

blue bowl

Recently I have been taking a class devoted to Tolstoy's novels. Among hundreds of things, I have discovered that while War and Peace relatively dwarfs other ficticious novels (Harry Potter being an exception), it seems rather small when you realize that Tolstoy has more or less condensed human experience into a book the size of a cantelope.
Such a class is always exhilarating, or perhaps it is my own dweebiness that causes me to get so fully absorbed into this book. However, I can't disentangle a section of the book from my average train of thought. In the section a primary character, Prince Andrei, looks heavenward from a battlefield strewn with the ugliness of war. It's as if he is looking at the sky for the first time, and he notices nature's unperturbed blue canopy, altogether indifferent to his own agony and the war raging about him. Prince Andrei loses all sense of what had been previously important to him, and wishes only to be lost in the sky above him.
Walking out of class with this on my mind, I can't help but notice the lovely, indifferent reminder our own insignificance.