I was innocently reading War and Peace when I came across the following: It seemed to her [Natasha] that everybody knew about her disappointment, was laughing at her, and pitied her. With all the strength of her inner grief, this grief of vanity intensified her unhappiness.[Natasha loves Prince Andrei and can't understand why he hasn't visited in three weeks. Andrei is talking with his disapproving father about proposing to Natasha.]
Tolstoy labels the poor girl's anguish as "grief of vanity". In that passage, he reveals why everything we know about human behavior and how we moralize about it is obsolete. Take away language, strip Natasha's feelings free of the moral epithet, vanity, place the poor girl in a troop of monkeys where we all came from and, then, understand the truth of her grief, or what Tolstoy labels as grief.
Natasha's feelings, her pain, and her imagination about what others think of her is the evolved process by which all animals in our human troop find our places in society, either low down or high up or somewhere in the middle. Emotions, beyond our control, are mechanisms which move us to find and accept our places in the human monkey troop. Nothing noble about her feelings or reprehensible. Emotions just are. Tolstoy's moralizing is his monkey brain justifying his own processes of finding where he belonged in the human troop, and, interestingly enough, look how his feelings of "shame" caused Tolstoy to free his peasants and to unsuccessfully try and be like them, but he couldn't escape his own genius. Fortunately for me, I've got no genius to deal with. Only endless shame. Good movie to watch about Tolstoy is The Last Station.
PPS: For all my understanding of the human condition, I continue to write as of old, too old to change my ways, all the while asking, "How will any of us write if we no longer mythologize our feelings?" Perhaps we won't.
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