Burning Tolstoy On The Highway
March 3, 2009, posted by Tyler, under The Practicing Church | | 2 Comments
I heard a story once about a man who went on a bicycle-touring trip from Alaska to the Lower 48 (that’s what Alaskans call the contiguous states). It took me four days by car when I came down as a sophomore in college; it takes weeks or months on a bike. The thing about long distance touring is, every extra pound, every extra piece of equipment, is a lodestone to drag up every hill along the way. Canada is full of hills. So for entertainment this guy brought Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace to read at the end of the day. Any Tolstoy fan knows that War and Peace is heavy enough to double as a cinderblock. Our hero read War and Peace a little differently than most: to keep weight down on his bike, he burned the pages as he went.
War and Peace is widely considered one of the greatest novels of all time. And here our trekker is, in the Yukon Territory on the side of the Alaskan-Canadian Highway, burning pages out of one of the most brilliant single poetic accomplishments of mankind. Books read much differently when there is no way to go back. War and Peace is over 1400 pages long and has some 580 different characters. You pay special attention to the page knowing full well that it will soon be gone and you must move on. It’s under this close scrutiny that you encounter Napoleon and Alexander I, and through this light that the battle of Austerlitz unfolds. Our cyclist lived in a heightened sense of awareness, in immediate and intimate contact with emotions, thoughts, and understandings. In each page, he was alive. In him, each page lived.
Were all radios. We spend most of our day tuned to the frequencies of stress, anxiety, and work; to our phones and Email addresses; sometimes we tune to white noise and just zone out. When we slow down, engage with our world, and reset our tuning, other frequencies get through, like otherlyness. The sin of burning Tolstoy aside, this story helps us understand how we define The Practicing Church. By burning the pages behind us, we can live in the moment, really listen to a friend and, as the case may be, offer to let him throw his pack, his bike, and his body in the back of the car for a lift up the next hill.
Tyler, I like your point about how living in the moment enables us to be more otherly.
I think it’s interesting how young children live in the moment (sometimes it’s annoying if we have agendas for them, how much of their attention ‘the moment’ has) but as we get older we develop habits of living somewhere else. Maybe that’s one reason Jesus said unless we change and become like children we’ll never enter the kingdom of heaven?
My favorite insights from you
another great band name
living in tbe moment is one of the foundational practices of otherlyness- it provides us with a spiritual rationale/excuse to give our attention away to someone who is feeling invisible