March 7th, 2025
There's a difference between life and self
Reading difficult books, superheroes as civilizations, and play-doh
Just five minutes ago, I finished reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. It's my first Tolstoy, and in fact my first piece of Russian literature all together. It took me about a month to finish. There's a struggle in reading novels as dense and slow as Anna Karenina, and I wish I enjoyed that struggle more. But the truth is that most of my time reading the novel, it felt like homework. And to an extent, it kind of was. The only reason I picked up the book was that a comic book writer whose work I've admired, Deniz Camp, cited both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as primary influences.
However, although I wasn't entertained, I wouldn't say the experience was not fulfulling. There's certainly a generational/cultural difference there, with my generation being raised in a media landscape that priotizes dopaminergic entertainment above all else. Scorsese's famous "theme-park" critque of the Marvel cinematic universe is a good example. With Anna Karenina however, and with other novels from that era as well, I certainly found moments of exhileration, as with Vronsky's horse race, but those moments and scenes exist alongside the full spread of the emotional and literary specturm. The book is billed as a romance, and it delivers not only a cathartic, pleasent romantic arc, but also the oppisite in the form of the titual heroine's tragedy. Yet on top of those two intertwinned romances, the novel also exmaines a myriad of Tolstoy's own intellectual curiosities, moving between every element seamlessly.
With the rise of "brain rot" (TikTok, Instagram Reels, etc.), it feels as though art is moving towards atomization. Art needs to provide the most concentrated shot of entertainment or joy or fun, otherwise it is labelled as boring, not providing enough of a high to keep us engaged. If reading through Anna Karenina has taught me anything, with it's fullness and density of life, its that perhaps I need to accept a less atomic life, and embrace the idle boredom that exists at the root of reality.
I was thinking about Wonder Woman earlier today, as one does, and felt myself drawing an analogy between civilizations and serialized superhero comics. For most of the last forty years, it feels as though Wonder Woman comics have long been trying to capture the magic that was George Perez's seminal run on the character. The run is not only the longest, but arguably the most influential of the modern era, second only to William Moulton Marston's original creation. This pattern exists not just with Wonder Woman. The idea of a foundational run, that is mighty in it's length, popularity, and influcence, one that most future writers attempt to recreate in some capacity, exists for a number of other superheroes. For Wonder Woman, it's Perez, for X-Men, it's Claremont, and for Superman, it's Byrne. In a sense, I find this phenomenon to be similar to the way that civilizations often hold up certain early empires as a "golden age". For Europe, this was, and arguably still is, the heights of the Roman Empire; for much of the history of the Islamic world, it was the Umayyad Caliphate; and for China, one can point to the Han Dynasty. I've been curious about this inclination to mythologize a past golden-age for some time, as I feel as though that in no sphere of my life am I living through one of these so-called golden-ages. I wonder if people reading Perez's Wonder Woman week to week, or the average ancient Roman citizen felt the same as I do, or if they had a clarity about the "golden-age" they were in, before the mythologizing. I'm sure there are records from those periods that could both confirm either theory.
"You are not the experiences, you are that which experiences" is a quote I heard some time ago from somewhere on the internet. When I heard it, I truly could not wrap my head around it. But this week, I was walking through the library and I saw some people playing with play-doh. They didn't seem to have a clue what they were making, but they were having fun anyway. Sometimes, a piece would fall off their sculpture and rather than lament the failure, they would just pick it up and place it back on, careful to ensure it wouldn't happen again. In life, you are not the play-doh, you are that which plays with the play-doh. You are simply the being that plays with the gift of life, not the life itself. The goal isn't to build something perfect, nor even build anything specific at all, but rather, simply to keep playing, earnestly and with a sense of joy. Life is something you do, something you serve, not the thing you are. I don't think I really understood that for a long time, nor do I think I understand it fully now. But it's become a perspective I believe it worth operating from, since the one I held before historically hadn't really worked out all that well.