Welcome back to the new thing, Kree on David Barr. And with me as always, this is my good friend, Alex Prey, how are you, Alex? Doing well, David. How are you?
How's Rowan? He's doing well. He's next to me. We've watered him and he's honked out, which is good.
We'll see how long that lasts. I wanted to, Greg, how are you, Greg? Honestly, I'm pretty tired. It's been a long hard week.
I've been teaching a lot of these high school academies. But the good news is I got a, I got a promotion at work. So I'm now the assistant director of the Ashford's Hall of program. So that's important to me.
Man, I got to play a few games of cards this week. So between the work and relaxation, I'm feeling like this kind of complete right now. That's excellent. So we disagree.
You're a man that's puffed up easily by honors. Thank you with titles. I wanted to say thank you. I got to say it's eerie that.
My tolls told you, by the way, you guys just blew my passive. Like you've got a promotion and like, whatever, never mind. So you didn't get a promotion. Great.
Oh, I thought I was going to make, I was going to submit that it was shaving your beard. I finally, okay, we can't get more. It's public facing now. Really quick before we go on, I wanted to thank two people who are listeners to our shows every week.
They listened to our show and they've been supportive. My friend Sean McGlynn, he's a lobbyist at K&L Gates. So we great K&L Gates, you legal powerhouse if you could fund all of our shows, but you won't. And Alex is mom fresh to pre you.
He's an elegant, beautiful woman. And she listens every week. And I really, all right, Craig and I was Alex. This isn't the edit this episode, but we just wanted to say how grateful we are that you listen.
And even though you're the mother of one of the hosts, it always makes me feel touched. And so thank you. You told me Greg's her favorite, which really pissed me off. But why is that?
Because he's a nice guy. I don't know, maybe. I think he's actually really nice David. I wasn't expecting I expected some jokes and you actually sincerely thank the people.
That was not a lot of these things here. The joke is what I wanted to describe tonight's episode on Tolstoy's novella, the death of Ivan Illich. I read it. My wife bought me a Kindle for my birthday.
And I read it on a Kindle. And I don't know if you guys have read novels on a Kindle or a philosophy. I think Alex actually will study Plato on a Kindle, but it's disorienting for me. My memory wasn't as good.
You can't like finger the books, turn them over in your hand, things like this. And so it was a weird experience. I just wanted to share that. I read a ton of my iPad.
I enjoy it. But now it's not a Kindle, right? Well, it's similar in that, you know, it's a reading device. It doesn't have pages.
This episode bought you an Apple and iPads. Yeah, the other thing I was talking about, we have a powerful audience. That's a good point. Yeah, the other thing I downloaded the other night was Gibbons to climb and fall and Roman history is complex.
I don't know. We should do an episode on those books. No, no, besides Wayne Amblur. Anyway, so today's short story is about Greg, except Greg never seems to die since he's into the 90s instead as the body of a youth.
Yes, I think 12 score and going strong, folks. Yeah, so we picked this episode. I think I picked it. Oh, it is.
It's a short story. I know Valla, so a little bit longer than a short story that I read every other year. And just read this every other year. Oh, yeah.
I love it. Why? It's just, this will come out during the episode, I think. Yeah.
It just reminds me of staying on the path. What path is that? It's just valuing life and good relationships and serious pursuits and not to just be frivolous. Can you tell me just about the author first before we come in the text?
Yeah, so everybody is familiar with Tolstoy. He was born in 1828. He died in 1910. His major works are War and Peace, Anna Corinna.
But he has a number of short stories. This is amongst his most famous. The Croods are Sonata is also famous. Hajimurat is a very, very good short story.
It takes place in the caucuses that I would urge everyone to read. He, along with Dostoyevsky and Pushkin, Chekhov are among the Russian greats. So when people just shorthand and talk about Russian literature, it's the love for Google. Oh, no, no, I love for Google.
It's funny, right? We should do Dead Souls. Yeah, yeah. There are a few people that I'm, I don't mean that we should definitely go.
But he and Dostoyevsky are the Titans. Right. And Dostoyevsky is not in the quiet state. I think he's easier to pick up than Tolstoy.
I mean, Russian literature is hard because you have to use a patronymic. It's the names, like they shorten them, they elongate them, pisses you off. I love Russian literature, but it's easy to get into. Maybe that's why I like it.
No, no, no, once you get the hang of the names, I love it. Tolstoy is less interesting to me than Dostoyevsky, but we should do Dostoyevsky at some point. I had to have a corrupted soul. Yeah, you do.
He was also interestingly passed up for the Nobel Prize for Literature a number of times. Is that right? Nobody ever accused that August body of making good choices. No, he's no Dylan, you know?
Yeah. So what do we, do you want to do an overview of the story? Yeah. So yeah, so we were in the run show.
We just decided that David would do who was Tolstoy and have the overview of the novella to death of Ivan Ilyich. And here's my summary, the guy dies. I don't know, it's kind of difficult. So there's 12 chapters.
He dies in the first chapter. And then in chapter two, we go back to his young life. He's still a young man. And in the following 10 or 11 chapters, we see his life proceed.
And then the penultimate, an ultimate chapter, I believe, we return to this for the present day and he dies. In the interim, we learn about him that he's sort of an average bourgeois type. He's a... Upper middle class.
Upper middle class. I would say he's a magistrate. But if you were to transpose him to modern day, you could say that he works for McKinsey. And there's some funny lines in the story that he wears, clean suits and clean tie, clean finger nails.
But he's a government official, not working in a private sector, right? Yeah. Yeah. But he's in increasingly more important positions.
Right. What's also fascinating about his public life is that he seems to have started acquiescing to political changes that are happening in Russia at the time. So he's even the establishment of a judiciary is somewhat liberal or Western or non-Russian, I suppose. What are the important things we learned about him?
He was successful at work, a couple of minor setbacks or major setbacks, in fact. But he finally does get the promotion he wants. And when he finally gets the big promotion that he wants, that's when he has... He's decorating his new home because he's got this new job and that's when he has a fall where he hurts his side.
And the doctors are at pains to figure out what's wrong with him. There are a couple of different alternatives suggested. One is a floating kidney. I forget what the other one is off the top.
He had... But my translator tells me it's likely that he had a penicitis before they knew what a penicitis was. And so he suffers a long, slow painful death. A few other things happen.
Go ahead, sir. No, I apologize. Go ahead. No, no, no, fine.
There were just a few other points that I thought were probably worth mentioning. He's married. He doesn't seem to be particularly fond of his wife. It's mentioned in passing that he had a number of children.
I went back to try to count them. It seems like I came up with five. Three of them die. Two were mentioned to have died.
And then in passing a few paragraphs later, it's mentioned that another one died. The deaths of his children are not reported to have had any serious effect on Ivan Ilyich. He doesn't seem to have destroyed him in the way that I think he would think that the death of a child would destroy someone. So two remain and two of the children are there for their major, his life.
One of them is there and present. It seems to have some concern for his father. But by and large, he seems detached from his wife and children. His life is a social climber.
Prescott. Yeah. Right. He comes from a nice Prescott.
I think. Prescott. Yeah. I've written down here, but I don't know how to say it.
Prescott. Yeah. I actually have a Russian listener. So I guess just a few other points.
But he doesn't. He passes his time playing vent. What I was playing cards with his. What do you call it?
Vent. V-I-N-T. I've got to waste. Different translation, I guess.
Yeah. Some kind of a card game. Yeah. And so he doesn't nothing really occupies his life.
He has his daughters engaged to a young nobleman. My son is an adolescent. He's not particularly close with his family. He didn't marry for love.
No. He married. Yeah. He found her attractive.
I thought that what Tolstoy says is he finds her. He's very possessing. But it also helped that she was wealthy. So there was an un-adjectionable match.
It just made sense. This is not the kind of phrasing that we would use about our respective lives. But I mean, it's of a piece with his general shallowness. He marries because he's attractive.
They seem to get along great. Also, it's advantageous from a sort of social. Can I just read the passage? In fact, this was a read it.
And I would like to say, and then read a Greg. And then if you could describe it to Millieu, because he is not a man apart per se, he's very much, as Alex said, a piece of his environs. So at the beginning of the play. Sure.
This is a, I don't know. I'm going to recall them chapters. There are 12 of them. Yeah.
This is in chapter two. She fell in love with him. So she was in love with him. I've nearly had no clear and definite plans for marriage.
But once the girl fell in love with him, he began to wonder, when all said and done, why shouldn't I get married? He asked himself. Then skipping down just a little bit to claim that I've nearly had gotten married because he was in love with his bride. And so on her, someone who shared his out with her life would have been no more justifiable than to say that he married because the match meant with the approval of the society that moved in.
I have an ilipe marriage for both reasons. So he, well, anyway, he was pleasing himself by acquiring such a wife. But at the same time, he was appealing to his superiors and there's sense of propriety, and then a once-sentence paragraph. So I have an ilipe she got married.
So maybe he loved her, but at the very least, it's very ambivalent. It's certainly not the case that he was passionate about it. Well, it's amazing. It works out.
Yeah, right. It works out. You know, in the way that things are supposed to work out, as things tend to have done in I've been life was these. And one thing, if I can just say one thing on the structure, I think I was thinking like, how is this structure?
Because after the first section just proceeds chronologically up to the present, and the way I understood it is, there's really two parts. The first part and the subsequent 11 parts. So the first part gives you the reaction to I've been to his death by his colleagues, his family, just those around him and how it's received with sort of bureaucratic sort of interests and money interests of his wife and everything sort of superficial. And it just seems unremarkable.
And then you get into what he went through from his perspective. And you realize how beneath this sort of ordinary surface and the very sort of petty and a bourgeois considerations and interests of the his associates and family, there exists a real turmoil within him, as he's wrestling with what becomes increasingly clear is his impending death from this. But the turmoil only starts because it's precipitated by the death. It's he didn't start.
Absolutely. Yeah. And it's I think what's interesting about it is the structure, the way I understood it is that what you're seeing is in a way, when you compare the first section with the subsequent 11, what you're seeing is in a way how the sort of social considerations of the conventions of the time hide from your site, great depths of sort of suffering and sort of doubt that nobody cares to see. You just want them to die and the overwithen and the world can keep moving.
And it's I think a great testament to how there's often silently very big things happening that you don't see. I think we just stepped aside a second and let the listeners know about our sponsor for today's episode. I'm sure all our listeners enjoy podcasts about classical texts and important thinkers, but they wish they had someplace to take their questions. Thebert and all of them are as lucky as you Greg to teach us such an illustrious university and such an illustrious institute as the Ashburns of the Earth, Ashland University.
Oh, right. You can agree. And the new thinkery, right? Another one has an Alex Pree to ask questions up.
So what do they do? What if I want to know more about Plato? Go ahead and Davenant Hall, Greg. You can see Davenant Hall and they advance their new classical wisdom in the digital age.
And they have a Plato seminar. You don't know Plato from a hole in the wall, Greg. I know Plato from Plato. Well, you do know holes in the wall.
Yeah. Yeah. That doesn't want to. Well, Plato is the cornerstone of any philosophical education they say, but it is often summarized, right?
So this time and other, actually, you're going to let you look over a couple of key works, the Alcibiades, the Aetetus office and states and also some shorter dialogues. And there you'll get the essence of Plato's own thought firsthand. Don't you want the essence? I do.
I don't really want to go anywhere. You said this is down in Hall. I mean, I'm content here in the world that is a nice people in Ashland, Ohio. Well, this is only two hours per week on Zoom.
Oh, it's not an actual place. It's digital. Yeah. But then they say it's in-person live instruction.
I guess it's not in-person. But yeah, you're talking to a person. They're actually there. It's live, right?
It's seminar-style, right? Your questions are welcome. You get heard, right? Now, how much do you think something like this would cost you, right?
Five hundred thousand dollars. Much, much less. Two hundred thousand dollars. It's one hundred and forty nine dollars.
Sweet Jesus. That sounds awesome. And you don't even have to attend. You can actually just listen to the conversation later.
It runs from late September to mid-December, right? And it's open. The registration is open from until mid-December, right? Where should I go if I'm interested in spending 149 of my hard-earned dollars on learning about Plato?
Now, you go to Davenant Hall.com. That's D-A-V-E-N-A-N-T. Hall, if you can't spare it, don't go take a course on Plato. .com.
And you have other course offerings as well. Ancient languages, studies of great thinkers. This is really great. I'm going to need you to give me that website.
One more time I was busy eating some cheese. I have to put cheese down to get a pencil. Give me that website one more time, pal. It's D-A-V-E-Dave.
N-A-N-T-Nent. Hall, H-A-L-L.com. Now, back to the show. I know we have some themes we want to talk about, but I just had a couple of small points.
One is that, you know, just as a pitch and maybe folks are already listening. But I think this is an excellent book to read. I think it's really can sort of compel people to maybe start to begin to think about things that the other ones might not have. I think this is an excellent book to recommend to people, to get them to begin to think about their mortality.
But one brief aside is that I was speaking to a group of high school students with law school ambitions, and I started talking about this book because I was reading it in preparation for this. And I realized halfway through that I was like, I'm really depressing these 16-year-old kids who I want to become lawyers. This is not the appropriate place. But anyway, if you're an adult, I think the death of I've been really useful.
So I guess that's kind of my... Go ahead. That's a great point that pivots us the next one. Because when I was reading this, I was like, this guy was a millennial before millennials.
All he wants to do is hang out with his friends. He's not really into having kids and family. When his wife has a kid, things go, sorry. He's like, I'm just going to go to work and hang out.
I don't want to get away. He wants to live a luxurious lifestyle. He's getting new things. He spends at 1.1% of his salary on cakes for one dinner party.
I think it was a huge amount of money for him to do. Almost 1%. I think he was making 5,500 rubles, and he spent 45 on expensive cakes. That's almost 1%.
Exactly. It's a lot just for some cakes. But it's not just... again, it's not just going to start going on.
I just think this is strange. You feel like you're in another place and time, but then you don't. It does seem like he's kind of careerist. He's living a life of leisure.
He lacks any kind of substance to his life. And he has a rude awakening, which is... Just to support what he's saying, this even really restricts me is a very, very common human type in the modern world. This is not an atypical human being.
This is a normal guy. He's got a job. He's pretty good at it. He has his pleasures.
What he has is... he has work, which he's successful at, and he has his play, which he's successful at, in the modern world. He hasn't developed anything outside of those two. Not even deep family attachments, right?
Which I think is probably the most common way to form something serious in the modern world. Even that's kind of secondary. Yeah. Totally secondary in the friendships or secondary.
So Alex talks about the division, who's interesting. The two parts are chapter one, and then the subsequent 11 chapters. I agree with you, Alex. So if you imagine that the story had just been the first one, right?
That's the story for everybody in his life. It's totally... That could be a story unto itself. Yeah.
And what it is is the opening scene is shocking or depressing. It's because nobody cares. Let's say that it's Greg, right? Why would you?
Okay, fine. We don't need to do that. He's lying in heaven and his friend... Dave is into the home and he sees his other buddy, and he's like, they exchange glances as if to say, damn it, we're going to be late for cards tonight.
That's what Tolstoy writes. Right. And the whole time they're just trying to get outside A to smoke B to make it to their card game. It's just a few platitudes about their dead buddy.
But really, what they talk about aside from the card game is that secretly his death or inwardly is death bubbles up in them thoughts of promotion, because now there'll be a musical chairs in the legal department. Since you brought up the question of friends, one of the things is trying to mean that this strikes me is particularly true of our situation, people we know and how difficult it's been for us, for example. But when he gets a job, this is still in chapter two, I think, he has to move because he's got this new promotion. And it says, Avinelich was offered the post of examining magistrate and he took it, even though it meant moving to a new province, dropping all his old contacts and establishing new ones.
So whatever friends he'd actually made in his small town before, he drops them all for promotion. And I think there are a couple points here. One is how willing we are in the modern world to move away from where you actually develop these ties. But then, secondarily, how difficult it is to form friendships for adults, especially adult men, but probably the same approach for women as well.
That moving to, in other words, the natural time to begin to acquire friends is when you're young. And there's something that those kinds of friendships can persist through adulthood. And so moving somewhere as an adult, I mean, it's very, I don't think, I mean, look, everywhere I've ever moved, I've been amazed at how few adult male friends, my male friends have had, right? Like, I mean, think about your dad's, I mean, how many friends do they have?
We know that's shocking also because my dad is social well, and he had many friends. But I think it's also a, yeah, you move, and then you get married. And it's forward-facing. To throw a little spin on that, it just seems like it's the pressure of the sort of political and economic arrangement, right?
He's a member of a bureaucracy. I just got back from visiting home. And I missed it quite a bit. It's nice to see friends and family and to being familiar, places, familiar climate and all that sort of stuff.
But sort of pressed by necessity to move to Longmont, Colorado, and places. Well, Alex, when you have to move from the Green Pastures of Greenwich, Connecticut to Longmont, Colorado. It's something strange happens when you go there. You just start seeing all these like Ferraris and G-Wagons, you're like, I want one.
It's the temptation. You start to miss the pleasures of home, right? Right. So, but the one thing, you know, so there is that pressure and along with that pressure is a general sense of this is how you ought to live.
You guys both said he's kind of typical, and I think that's right. But I think he's also attained a level of success that others might envy, right? And so he's atypical slightly in the sense that he might be something that people end up being and they want to have that kind of life. And they think, oh, if I just had an idea of his job, I could have a much more pleasant and comfortable life.
And so he did what one ought to do. He got over the obstacles he ought to. And then what was his reward for it? Right.
That's the real question. One moment that stuck, jumped out to me when he so he enters himself because he's gone. He's got this new apartment. He's got the perfect apartment.
He's getting drapes and everything while his wife is back in their old home. And he's getting it ready. And as he's hanging the drapes, he kind of falls off of the ladder or whatever. And his side hits a handle, door handle or something like that.
And it leaves a bruise or something. And he doesn't think much of it. And it's actually the pain starts to go away before, you know, it really comes back. And it's stuck to me that this is what kills him.
And it was almost like it's struggling. It's almost a caricature of sort of, you know, great virtue or martial virtue, right? I'll sacrifice my life for the sake of what? Drapes.
That's what he lost his life for is this pleasant drapes. And that's all that he that's all the opportunity he has for greatness is a pretty apartment and playing Will's with friends. Yeah. Right.
He had just that's kind of we've been using word friend loosely. He doesn't have any friends, I think, strictly speaking. I mean, they're poker buddy. I agree.
He has one his closest friend is the one that wants to get out of his peter Ivanovich is the one that wants to get most quickly leave his his funeral. I don't want to go ahead too much on the wrong show, but it was striking this time having read it how Aristotelian the book seems he seems to be lacking all of the things that Aristotle thinks are conducive to a good life. And we'll talk about that later. Yeah.
So I have a question though, but before maybe as a way to. Wait, why talk about that later? Same more? I want you more.
Okay. Sure. So it seems like what was Aristotle, the Nicomachean ethics, what's important for life? Friendship is important for life.
He doesn't seem to have any friends in the ethics. Aristotle talked about different types of friendship or love. One of them is familial love. And the most natural or the most spontaneous that humans are drawn to.
So he doesn't have he doesn't have love in his family. He doesn't have friends the second type of love. He seems to if aerosol seems to divide the human life into categories of workplace and leisure, it works necessary in something that we have to do in somewhat serious and unpleasant. Play is pleasant, but not very serious.
If my Aristotelian standards, Ivan doesn't seem to have developed anything that would be sort of serious, but not, but also pleasant to him. So he only has frivolous pleasures, not serious, no high pleasures. He doesn't really read. I mean, he reads, we're told he reads whatever books everyone else is reading.
The only book, by the way, the author who's mentioned is Emil Zola. That's the one I found. So he reads just to sort of keep up with whatever. Like if DaVinci code, he would have been reading DaVinci code, right?
Because that's what everyone's reading. Yeah, I like DaVin clamsing. He also loved. I haven't, yeah.
I've heard that. So I mean, I'll just, I'll push back and just moment. But the initial thing is why are we still in standards? He's doing nothing that's conducive to living a good life, except providing for his material well-being.
I mean, he's got to have a job and these sorts of things that's necessary, but he seems to be interested in living comfortably, as you said, he seems to be too wrapped up in, I don't know, what beautiful trifling objects and these kinds of things, drapes and carpets, presumably goes with it. That's a great point because Aristotle is just reading this actually, today and yesterday, but he emphasizes both at the end of the ethics and the end of the politics, that the end of leisure is not play, right? Yeah. Noise has just rests, only rests insofar as it serves to help you engage in some kind of activity.
So he's only got the rest in the work, but what he's missing is something serious. Yeah. Once he's provided for his necessities, he's eating bonbons. Right.
You know what's interesting about this? By the way, I'm sorry, I don't want to press on this. This is another way I think that he's very, very typical. And I think typical of most of them, I'm sorry, I don't want to offend our listeners, but not our listeners, because they're exempted from this, because they're listening to the New Thinkery, which is clearly a high leisure activity.
But a lot of our- But on the bonbons and listen with a notebook. But I mean, right? I mean, work hard play hard, a very American turn of phrase, which leaves no room. If that's your entire life, it leaves no room for the things that are neither work nor play.
Greg, have you been to South Korea or China? You know, talking about how hard we work and we don't work as hard as we used to, is that what you're saying? I mean, no, I think we're not the world worst as far as- I was just reading Tofeldo and he was talking about in the 1830s how Americans surpassed everyone in the world and work. How much harder we worked than everyone.
David and I used to have a friend whose father's favorite song was, Everybody's Working for the Week. Somebody said that to me today as I was walking it was Friday when we were recording, so I was like, Hey, Greg, everybody's working for the week and I was like, I'm not. Yeah. But you know, you should thank God for that, Greg.
I do. That's the one part that I thought was not a tooling here. I don't know how much you want to talk about this. Seems impressive in the work is Gerasim, I don't know how he says his name, but the servant who helps him as he's dying and much is made of this figure's religiosity.
And so if there isn't a moral to the story until it does seem to be, there doesn't to be a moral impetus to whatever's going on here. The moral seems to be that, I mean, I'm not sure if a religion can somehow provide that deeper meaning to man's life, it seems. Yeah, but he doesn't hit you over the head with religion. No, no, no, no, not at all.
You're right. It's just sort of seemingly insignificant figure. Yeah. One thing one thing is with noting just to support your point, Greg, about his life of leisure is that the only reason he's successful in work is because he throws himself into it with ambition.
The only reason he does that is this is why he gets a little testy. This is a nice thing. Section two, it says, as his wife became more irritable and demanding, Ivan Ilya's transferred the center of gravity of his life to his work. So it was not his obsession with his work.
He came to like his work more and more and became more ambitious than he had been before. One of the funny things to me is that the book, I think one could read this book and think that Tolstina, one could read the book and think the post-story is blaming Ivan Ilya's wife. But I think there's another way to look at it. And that's that what you just read is only a few paragraphs after the part where it says he didn't love her, or it doesn't say he didn't love her.
But it's one of the acceptance, because I was just just real quick, though. I think that one of the things that Tolstina is insinuating is that her increasing animosity toward him is, I suspect, increasing realization that he doesn't love her. Yeah. Sorry, Regent Namm in the world now.
That's not what everyone does. No one thinks seriously about it. I think a lot of the story, whether it's how much of Ivan's issues are a result of his inward failings, or is it the culture that he's placed himself with it? And if only he could live in the country or he would escape some of these dangers.
Do you guys have any thoughts on that? Because all of his friends seem corrupted in the same manner. For all of the people at his funeral, you could write a separate death hub and then just insert their names. Oh, that's included.
No, the only difference is that Ivan has to have died at 45 of his free accident. Yeah. And what's miraculous about Ivan is he starts thinking about these other things. I think most people that we encounter in life, they go through and just kind of unthinkingly, and then they die.
Ivan has a protracted death. Talk to somebody that's had cancer and hopefully beat it if it's a friend of yours. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to talk to them. You could talk to them while they had it.
Oh, okay, got it. What they're saying, people don't always die in that way. Their brain's sometimes decay first. So they can't have this period.
So he's had this pain that constantly reminds him of his situation. But I think most people just die and they don't think about it. And they have sh** marriages. I think that's right.
Right. I'll challenge you a little bit on that because we were talking about this before. And I think obviously, your brain goes or you're in a coma or something, you're not reflecting on it. But somebody in a similar situation of diving, this is where he's got his mental faculties about him.
He's young enough, right? He has a real sense of loss that, oh, I'm only 45. Perhaps I could have done more. And he's having this painful, sad experience.
He realizes that the life he lives, sorry, before the realization. I think a lot of people will start going over their life and listing their regrets, average people. Now, do they get to his profound place? Maybe not.
Do they suddenly are like, oh my gosh, I need to just sit down and read the feed out now. For you know, it's all the day I die and constantly. No, obviously not. But I think the sense, maybe we need to get to this sooner rather than later.
But the sense that the life he was told he should live, these sort of conventions about what a good life is and that he in large part did succeed in living. I think the realization that might not have been everything to it, would it be uncommon for somebody in his situation? But I mean, it's hard to... I once was high school English, so it must have been based on a short novel or a poem or no village, not like that.
But we watched a short film and it was about this guy about to be hanged. And then this whole duration of the film was him thinking about it, sort of him escaping and then how he would fix his life and all this stuff. And at the very end, it showed him being hung, being hanged. And so the point was that the actual amount of time that it laughs was like two seconds or something like this.
And so to your point, I kind of agree with you, I'm not sure if I could hear this either of you here. I'm sort of agreeing with both of you, is that even this guy who's being hanged and this plinko and I is still trying to run through all these thoughts and regrets and questions about how he should have lived and stuff like that. So, I mean, you're right, I think you're right David, that the longer that's stretched out, the more opportunity you have to reflect on these things. But I do wonder if even if you see it coming at all, is that even that millisecond enough to start thinking, of course, that's not sufficient amount of time to think these things through, but do you start to immediately go to that place?
I think it's an awareness that emerged. Yeah. Yeah. Has either even been present when someone died?
Yes. I hesitate to talk, it could be incriminating. Yeah. So weird, it's a weird sort of phenomenon.
Oh, no, not in the presence of somebody who was talking up until their last moment. Is that what you mean, Greg? No, no, no. No.
Did you see DiGrog? I was a family member. I mean, you could see the thinking, I mean, I could see thinking things through. Yeah.
Yeah. I had it. I was after a long protracted death. I did it a girl whose dad was just like not successful.
The mother supported the family. He was not successful and he was very depressed. And he would occasionally talk about how he just he didn't like his life. I think he just wanted to play all of the family and friends over have a party.
And then when everybody left, just like drink a bunch and take a bunch of sleeping pills and go out into, you know, that could be. It's his name, the entries. No, no, no. And it struck me.
I was like, wow, this guy seems kind of doe by and large. And and here he is, he kind of understands like it's not with living. Let me just have one good night and then I'll get a call. Can I, you came across something shared with me on Twitter, not just me, but the whole Twitter world, but about Strauss's last words.
Yeah. Well, like, it's like, come on, that's fantastic. I'm gonna share it. I'm gonna share it.
Alex. No, I forgot the story. Oh, you found David. I'm sorry.
I found it in one of the Strauss interviews with former students. I think it's just a funny story. I can't remember. It was cast, right?
Cast found them in the room with them when Strauss was dying. Yeah. And then it's, and then he wakes back up and he says, like, fooled you. Yep.
And then then dies. Right. Right. Right.
Sick. I have a collection of favorite last words I'm working on. There's the the Socrates one, obviously, then there's that one. And then there's the one from Rousseau's confessions where the lady starts and says, anyone who's in the fart like that has a lot of life left in her.
And then Rousseau says, and then she died. So that's another good one. Maybe we can talk about, we've talked a lot about, is that this so Ivan has this realization. What's the nature?
Can I talk a little bit about that? What's the nature of his self-realization? It's not, as Alex said, he doesn't start pouring over church fathers and trying to get his soul right with the Lord or anything like that. It's it comes like little lightning bolts to him.
It's as simple as the interactions he has with the garrison or the butler's helper, the moose act, they say that, the the provincial, the Russian peasant that helps him put his clothes on and chains his bedpan. Yeah. So I think, how do you characterize his turning point from the Ivan of the past to this reflective Ivan? Or is it even a reflective state he's in?
Oh, he gets to, I think he has a pretty almost a kratic insight, very loosely put at one point. But what seems to be the turning point is the reality of the pain. This is in section six, he says, suddenly in the midst of it, the pain in his side pain, no attention to the stage, the proceeding side reach would begin its own knowing work. I'd immediately just sense it, drew the thought of it away, but it would go on and it emphasized would come and stand directly in front of him and look at him.
And he would be dumbstruck. The light would go out in his eyes and he would again begin asking himself, can it alone be true? So I think one of the important sort of precursors of his realization is him discovering the reality of the pain, which then leads him eventually to understand that the death is also going to be real. Right?
Now the the way also like he starts, he starts to hate healthy people as one does when the one is sick. Your friends are outside playing, you know, this is an muted way when you're a child. You curse the luck of your friends, you have to go play soccer while you're sick and glad. But imagine what Ivan is, his family is like, well, we're going to the opera now.
Sure. You don't want us to stay home with you father. And he's like, just get the hell out of my connection. He doesn't have a come to God moment.
Actually, as you put it up, Tiffany, something like that. So I was struck by, I'll point out a couple of things in my translation and then we'll see if you guys agree or make a different translation. But very near the end after he's had this, I think it's right after what Alex just read when he realizes he's going to die. He begins to cry.
This is in chapter nine. Yeah, he begins to cry. And it says that he burst into tears like a child. He was weeping because of his own helpless state, his loneliness, other people's cruelty, God's cruelty, and God's non-existence.
And then he asks the question in his mind, presumably. And I want to ask somebody who knows the Russian original if this is in the original because he says, why has Dal done all of this? Why has Dal brought me to this point? Why, oh, why does Dal torture me like this?
It sounds like my translator is trying to echo the King James Bible. And then, so he seems to be speaking to God in chapter nine. And then again, in the final chapter, this is chapter 12, he says, he feels a jolt inside his chest. Something is shining.
It was on third day with sickness. There's some Christian imagery there, I think. And he says, maybe I can still put my life right. This is the passage I have in mind.
This was the very moment when I finally should fall in through and see a light. So he's been having this dream about falling through a black sack. And we finally had the dream to just go through the sack. And it was revealed to him that his life had not been what it should have been when she kept going back and forth about, but that it could still be put right.
And then he says to himself, or he says to God, I don't know, yes, I'm hurting them, he said, he's talking about his family and friends, they feel sorry for me, but they'll be all right when I'm dead. He wanted to tell them this, but he wasn't strong enough to get the words out. Anyway, no good talking, must do something. He looked at his wife motion to their son and said, take him away, sorry for him.
And you, he tried to say forgive me, but it came out as for goodness, dot, dot, dot, two weeks to correct himself, he waved his hand knowing that he who needed would understand. I suspect he who needed what understand is God and that maybe it's the sun, but I thought it was the sun. And you guys remember, do you remember what you do is you read that touching passage and then re-re-re-chapter one and the interpretation of the wife is like, yeah, he was just acting so weird at the end. And the sun doesn't seem to care.
So can we go back to, because there's that moment in six where he discovers the reality of the pain, right over other things. And then Greg, that was exactly the concept I want to look at. He starts to talk to God, but God doesn't answer. Who answers, he says, it was as if he were listening not to a voice that spoke and sounds but to the voice of his soul.
So the course of thoughts arising in him. What do you want was the first clear idea, expressible in words that he heard. What do you want? What do you want?
He repeated to himself, what not to suffer to live, he replied. And now he overcomes the pain, right? For the first I used to say, he's able to set aside his consciousness to live to live how as the voice of his soul. Yes, to live as I lived before, nicely, pleasantly.
As you lived before, nicely, pleasantly asked the voice. And then he starts going over all his pleasant experiences. And now they all seem meaningless, right? Except for childhood, that's the one thing.
But he says, all that had been seem like joys melted away and turned it to something worthless and often violent. I think one of the lessons that we get here is that the life devoted to pleasure or to nice living cannot be the good life because it ends, right? But he's not, I mean, he's not an epicureian. It's not the life devoted to the single mind and pursuit of bodily pleasures.
It's not even that like that, it's even higher than I think what he would. I don't think he's committed to any one way of life. He's just sort of easily going through it, not thinking about what it like to be a hedonist would be different in some ways more impressive than what Ivan Ilyich has done. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's true. It's less articulate in that way.
But the categories are nicely and pleasantly. Right. Right. Right.
That's fair. Easy. Easy going. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So, and because at one point he says, oh, we were playing a vent or a whisk or whatever. Yeah.
And you don't want to win too much. That's not pleasant. No, no, that's right. This off your friends.
So going a little further down then, so it starts with God. God kind of sets aside and it's a train of thoughts in his soul. He's being asked questions by his soul. And finally comes to this, I think kind of the credit conservation, he says, maybe I did not live as I should have would suddenly come into his head, but how not if I did everything one ought to.
So there's how one should live and then how one ought and obviously in English, those are basically equivalent. But I think how an auto live is everything he's been told about what a good life is and how he should live is what a good life actually is. And that tension between the conventions about the good life and the reality about the good life, that seems to be me to be a kind of socratic brief moment. And then at the end, he says, why would for all this horror, but however much he thought he found no answer and when it occurred to him as it often did, that it was all happening because he had not lived right.
He had once recalled all the correctness of his life and drove the strange thought away. So he suppresses this brief moment of what I took to be a profound reflection that he's finally come to. So that to me is like the key point in almost the whole thing. Hey, you know, it's a weird Tolstoy was famously Christian, he was the kind of, I don't know enough about his background, but shortly after his conversion, apparently he was pious in his own believer in his own way.
But I don't know that the nature of the type of Christianity he followed. That said, there seems to be the strange absence of God in the short story. And it would have been easy for Tolstoy, I think, to weave in more dogma, Christian dogma into the piece of he wanted. He could have had Ivan, he could have had him recollect the time where he was like listening to a sermon or at a conversation with the priest as a child, he had any one of these things, but he doesn't, he puts his conversion, if we can call it a epiphany, almost in secular terms.
There is one is that accurate or no? There's one time he invokes Christ's name, at least, where he also takes, I agree with your point, but there are some interesting exceptions that there may have been mentioned. He takes communion, but that's not his wife just had the priest come, he's like, it's like a thing you know, no, no, I wasn't called for the priest, his wife says, and then there's the servant figure I mentioned who seems to be pious. I don't know how we can just say, he does say the service is in the articulate for the most part, though, he just kind of grunts in his jersey.
Yeah, isn't he just kind of noble? He's like a mute George Washington, God's I'll have to go back and see, I think I had the passage highlight, but the very, yeah, here's a kind of action. Everyone else is talking about him dying and dying and dying, and he says, it's God's will, it'll happen to us all. So he seems to have a sort of religious resignation to the face of death, if we can speak of a philosophic resignation.
So when I was talking about what the Christ, the Christ when he says, for Christ's sake, let me know, right, it's a conspicuously like flippant way, but I mean, it does seem from what the passage you're pointing to that that's sort of what he is. So there's one more passage to this ocratic point that I forgot this is from the actually a little further down the pages in 11, he says, he's more suffering is consistent in the fact that looking at Garrison, sleepy, good natured, high, cheekbone face that night, it had suddenly occurred to him, and what if my whole life, my conscious life has indeed been not right? So it's the same thought. It occurred to him that what had formerly appeared completely impossible to him that he had not lived his life as he should have might be true.
It occurred to him that those barely noticeable impulses he had felt to fight against what highly placed people considered good barely noticeable impulses, which he might have, which he had immediately driven away that they might have been the real thing and all the rest might have been not right. So I think this is such, I think this is such an accurate portrayal of what I think human beings really do feel, even when they're in the grips of confension, there are these fleeting moments of awareness that, oh, this doesn't seem like a good life, but I'm already too deep. I'm just going to go with it. There's something that as we're reading this and as I was thinking about it and as we're texting about it, I wonder if we, David Alex and Greg, are fluttering ourselves too much in thinking that we won't have the same terror when we face death.
There are a couple of fundamental questions I think raised by this text. One is can a human being die, can a human being see death coming and not become terrorized? Even the most serious, we all agreed that Ivan Eilich is not very serious. Being is clear that he's never reflected upon death.
He hasn't studied Socrates without you. Even those of us who have studied Socrates, we'll, as we're lying there in our own mess and our friends and family are not being able to stand their company. By the way, the brief digression, I watched this Sunday morning news piece about a guy that they thought was brain dead for an entire year. And sorting people full of blood, and finally had a recovery and I couldn't believe it.
And it turns out he was completely cognizant of the entire time. So he heard everything everyone saying. Can you imagine that the hell that that must have been? So to return to the point, I wonder if any of us, if we see death and approaching, wouldn't still be stung by this question?