> I agree with you completely about wedding imagination to writing: that is, the fact that authors can exercise an empathetic imagination...and often do. But this thing about Natasha's "collapse" irks me. She does not collapse anymore than Pierre, but no one mentions his collapse -- from enlightenment ideals to self-satisfied domesticity. Well, she's so lively and interesting before, and afterwards she's such a  monster of motherhood. As for Pierre, the regression from enlightnment ideals seems less of a collapse because he's so unhappy when he's ideological. > It seems, equally, that part of what Tostoy is saying is that, on an individual level, this "collapse" is far preferrable to the megalomania that drove Napoleon to lay waste to Europe. There's something to that. Brecht put its; Unhappy is the age that needs a hero. Hobbes, too, celebrated quiet bourgeois greed as preferable to glory-seeking. > A good deal of trouble comes to the world out of the fear of being ordinary. Indeed. But isn't it possible to be ordinary and to be human at the same time? That i the problem with Natasha'a later development, no? She totally sacrifices herself to maternal instinct. Anyway, women's ambitions' haven't been the source of the world's grief, mostly. jks <hr size=1>Do you Yahoo!? <a href="http://rd.yahoo.com/mail/mailsig/*http://mailplus.yahoo.com">Yahoo! Mail Plus</a> - Powerful. Affordable. <a href="http://rd.yahoo.com/mail/mailsig/*http://mailplus.yahoo.com">Sign up now</a>