Free Everything Happens Today by Jesse Browner

junior, every grade he received this year would be an important part of his college transcripts, and he badly wanted to prolong his unbroken string of A’s in English, but he worried as he flicked through the post-its that he had never felt the least flicker of inspiration or kinship with the characters of
War and Peace
. In fact, he recalled thinking at the time that it was little more than
Gone with the Wind
with samovars. He’d read longer books in his time—
Lord of the Rings
, for one—and books that seemed longer—
Atlas Shrugged
, for instance—but
War and Peace
felt denser, somehow, as if the words weighed more on the page, the novel burdened by the gravity of its own importance, as if the years had given it a lustrous patina that made it appear more venerable than it really was. It was easy reading enough, he supposed, and not at all slow going, but irritating and clumsy at the same time, like scaling a rock face with a partner suffering from gout.
    The book fell open at page 467 and Wes began to read. Prince André was listening to Natasha sing and was evidently on the verge of falling in love with her. Typically, André was choking on his own philosophical boner. “A sudden, vivid awareness of the terrible opposition between something infinitely great and indefinable that was in him, and something narrow and fleshly that he himself, and even she, was.” Wes found himself distracted almost immediately. What was that supposed to mean—that our real selves are not our bodies? The tragedy of an expansive soul confined to a fragile, decaying cage of flesh? Not exactly a shattering insight. And yet, as he forced himself to read on, Wes remembered with vivid clarity precisely what had been on his mind when he had flagged this passage. It was an idea that had much preoccupied him at the time, three weeks earlier, when he’d read the book over the course of a single weekend—that life is, or should be, a perpetual interior war between alienated factions of human nature. It was only because Tolstoy was so ham-handed with characterization that Wes had been able to recognize in his writing the cartoonish extremes of a genuinely subtle and complex problem he’d been trying to work out for himself.
    What Wes had finally come to see as he watched Prince André fall in love with Natasha is that Tolstoy had divided his characters between strugglers, like André and Pierre, and accepters, like Boris and Berg, and that Tolstoy was firmly on the side of the strugglers—people who are continuously engaged in an inner battle with their own natures and received ideas of the proper way to live, even if it makes them miserable and turns every little decision into a swamp of confusion and loneliness. It was a problem that Tolstoy had illustrated as a black-and-white thing, and Wes felt that it was much more complicated than that, because he knew from personal experience that no one is purely a struggler or purely an accepter, but it was no less real and perplexing for all that. Wes felt that, like Tolstoy, he admired the strugglers, or tried to admire them, even if he couldn’t always grasp their internal dilemmas. To be a struggler was to be alone, and to be confused and lonely all the time, but just because you fight the good fight, choose the high road, doesn’t mean you admire yourself for it. Usually you irritate yourself to no end, because you can never find a comfortable way to be, and maybe you even end up hating yourself for having become the very person you aspired to be. You start to despise people like André and Pierre for the very things that make them admirable, and admiring dickheads like Boris and Berg for the very things that make them hateful. You ascribe qualities to them they don’t have, such as the thoughtfulness that would justify their arrogance and self-confidence, even though you know in your heart that they’re arrogant and