Appreciation …

… The greatest of all novels by Gary Saul Morson | The New Criterion.  (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

All purported social sciences held that, as with Newtonian astronomy, the complexity of observed phenomena was explicable by a few simple laws. But with society and individual psyches, Tolstoy insisted, the very opposite is the case: “the deeper we delve in search of these [fundamental] causes,” Tolstoy observes, “the more of them we find.” Things do not simplify, they ramify. Whatever regularities there may be are overwhelmed by sheer contingencies. Sometimes events happen just “for some reason,” a favorite phrase of Tolstoy’s indicating that no theory could ever predict them. And as contemporary chaos theory has rediscovered, sometimes apparently insignificant chance events can have concatenating effects and so make an enormous difference.

War and Peace certainly has as good a claim to being the greatest novel ever as any other novel, including Tolstoy's own Anna Karenina. Here is something I wrote about it.