Don’t know if this fits the vibe of the sub, but I thought I’d post it anyway.
Happiness is relative – it's all about expectations, and the fulfilment of our desires. And I’m scared that literature has given me wildly unrealistic expectations about life, relationships and human happiness.
I’m 18 now, but I read Anna Karenina for the first time when I was 15, and I genuinely think it changed my life. I wish I was joking, but I’m 100% serious. It captured the human experience with an intimacy I’d never really witnessed before, and I was genuinely amazed at how vividly I recognised myself in it. I sort of sat in awe after finishing it, thinking endlessly about all the beauty I'd just witnessed and all the lives I'd just led.
Tolstoy is still my favourite author, having read (and loved) War and Peace – and I followed this with The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Middlemarch, Tale of Two Cities, Tess, and pretty much all the other “great novels”. I'm not sure how to word this, but since I’ve started reading, I’ve been constantly going through this deep sense of loss. I feel like I terribly miss something I love from the bottom of my heart, but I don't know what it is, exactly. The closest thing resembling it is probably the emotions I’ve felt whilst alone, deeply immersed in the pages of a Tolstoy/Dostoevsky novel.
Nothing in life satisfies me, nothing makes me content, but I wouldn't say l'm depressed either. There's just this endless search for something, and at times I feel I can catch a glimpse of it in real life, and I'm moved to tears. Or I remember a dream and all the feelings that were stirring while I saw that dream, and feel entirely connected to them. It’s strange, because I actually have a pretty good social life – I’m backpacking through Europe with a huge group of friends as I type. But somehow I still feel disconnected, and really struggle to replicate the beautiful feelings roused in me whilst reading in person. It sounds sad and pretentious, but it’s true. I know that mundanity isn’t inherently bad, and that we can’t always be having euphoric experiences or deep, life-changing conversations. I appreciate and get satisfaction from tons of more superficial/light-hearted things, and that’s fine. Realistically, I know I’m not going to stumble across Alyosha Karamazov in a bar.
But however pretentious it sounds, it hurts that I’m most likely searching for something that doesn’t exist outside literature. Honestly, this probably isn’t about literature at all, but about problems in my personal life. I’m very young, I’ve got my entire life to have these experiences – but I’m slightly worried they’ll never come, and that I’ll never manage to build more meaningful relationships. I feel things so strongly on the inside, but on the outside, I feel like I have to pretend to be somebody else, and that it’ll always be unacceptable to be as vulnerable/genuine as characters are in novels—which hurts. Any advice from any fellow literature lovers? Does anybody feel the same way or am I just depressed?
by Own-Development-640