The Death
of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/03/anna-karenina-by-leo-tolstoy-one-of.html
10 out of
10
On the one
hand, this http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-death-of-ivan-ilych-by-leo-tolstoy.html is a magnum opus, one of the
greatest books ever written – I think it is included on the list compiled by
the Norwegian Book Club, which had asked the luminaries of our age, Nadine
Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, John Irving, Umberto Eco and others to name the crème
de la crème – but on the other hand, I am asking myself ‘why on earth do you need
to get on with this morbid subject?
Especially
since I have been here before, but then, there is this version on YouTube, read
by our greatest living artist, Victor Rebengiuc – in the same league with Jack
Nicholson http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/10/la-musica-by-marguerite-duras.html we have had George Constantin, a
divinity – and so I said let us hear this, only to see that death is so close
and I could be Ivan, soon enough
Another
great Russian, Fyodor Dostoyevsky http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-possessed-by-fyodor-dostoyevsky.html has had the misfortune to be sentenced
to death, and facing the firing squad, he divided his last three minutes
in…three, one to say goodbye to his family and friends, another to pass his
life in front of him, and the last to admire a ray of sunshine, falling on a
bell tower nearby
At least
this is the version I remember, as it was told (or maybe I modified it, with a
failing memory, however implausible it would be, seeing as I have repeated it
more than one thousand times) by our sublime professor of literature, Anton
Chevorchian, this is where my humble gratitude needs to be expressed, in one of
his classes…now I try to remember if we ever had ‘world literature’, or the
teacher was such a dissident that he talked about the world, in a communist
class in the Ceausescu regime…
Be that as
it may, Fyodor Dostoyevsky is pardoned in the last minute, or maybe the czar
had just wanted to scare him with a bogus death moment, and then he lives,
Alhamdulillah, and writes about surviving -whereas Leo Tolstoy tells us about
the agony of Ivan Ilych, his denial of God, the suffering, humility, the forgetfulness
of the others, colleagues think of the venues opened for their promotions, by
The Death of Ivan Ilych, the moribund has not had the chance to live as we
must, married a woman he did not love, with whom he fought, and at the end, it
looks as if ‘his life had not been what it must have been’
Dostoyevsky
gives us the advice that can change our lives, when we read one of his
masterpieces http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/06/crime-and-punishment-by-fyodor.html for in front of death, we see that
we must live the moment – as Tolstoy would put it in one of his most memorable
quotes, which I now have inscribed on a short ‘the most important moment is
now, the most important person is the one in front of you, and you need to make
that person happy’, words to this effect – and that is crucial
The author
of Crime and Punishment realized in front of the executioners that he would
rather live on an island, nay, a bare rock, in the middle of the ocean than die
– this is something he inserts in his chefs d’oeuvre, we have the man that
faces extinction think of that, but we know this is what had happened to the
author himself, it is based on acute reality, and we better think of this and
use it in our lives
We also
have the Stoics to learn from, and apply their deep understanding, for we have
the moment, but that is the only certainty http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/08/stoicism-stoic-approach-to-modern-life.html and we have to seize the moment…in
The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky , we are told about a drawing in
which a man is in the office and thinks of golf, in the next window, he is at
the golf club and he thinks of…sex, but while he has sex, he thinks of the
office, notwithstanding that this was a joke, it reaches to a serious problem,
for this is happening to many of us, however different in manner
Trying to
reach Maximum Experience, create conditions for Being in The Zone is a way to
cope with death – Flow http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/flow-by-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-this-is.html is a classic by the co-founder of
positive psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and it details the conditions –
you are in control, nothing else matters, there are clear goals, it is an
autotelic experience, feedback is constant and immediate, time changes, minutes
seem long hours and vice versa, challenges meet expectations
What I
would suggest to Ivan Ilych is to look at ‘Happiness Activity No 7: Learning to
Forgive –keeping a journal or writing a letter in which you work on letting go
of anger and resentment toward one or more individuals who’ve hurt or wronged
you’ and the rest of the wondrous book The How of Happiness http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-how-of-happiness-by-sonja.html but that is just in jest
It is easy
to say, oh, you need strategies to cope with adversity and trauma, when the man
is dying, it is a different game, and I shudder to think of it…brrr, let me
just run away from this and mention the example of incredible forgiveness, for
the same How of Happiness, where a young woman was killed in south Africa, but
her mother would travel there, and talked to the killer, and she not only
forgave him, but she would start a sort of ONG with him, if I remember well,
anyway, that is extreme forgiveness for you
Let me just
mention Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, yet another classic of
psychology and you find there the importance of having meaning, a notion that
is there, in the title http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/05/mans-search-for-meaning-by-victor-frankl.html the experience of the Nazi camps is
used in writing this
Now for a
question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more
than a million dollars with this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world – as it is, this is a unique technique, which
we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make
lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not
know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se
As for my
role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html
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