Autumnal Leaves

Day 285 of A Year of War and Peace

Aspiration is often so many autumnal leaves. Napoleon knows this now. Just yesterday he stood as the master of Moscow, lording his plans for progress and the proclamations necessary to effectuate them over the populace as if he were the world’s legislator. It’s easy to see how he convinced himself he had the potency to fill that seat of power. His personal history, after all, what with all the conquest and everything, seemed to direct him to that position. Just as easy as leaves bud and grow, however, so too do they fall.

Pretty much all of Napoleon’s plans fall apart today. “All these measures, efforts, and plans” Tolstoy writes, “which were not at all worse than others issued in similar circumstances — did not affect the essence of the matter but, like the hands of a clock detached from the mechanism, swung about in an arbitrary and aimless way without engaging the cogwheels.”

This failure provokes Napoleon and fills him with a bilious desire to punish the Russians for their recalcitrance. He withdraws from Moscow to pursue the Russian army. The withdrawal is so hasty Tolstoy compares the movements of the French from this moment forward as to the dying leaps and shudders of a dying animal.

It’s clear Tolstoy wants us to compare Napoleon and Kutuzov. Kutuzov is the consummate Buddha warrior, accepting the flow of time and events and tacking his action to them undesirously. Napoleon, on the other hand, desires to command the flow of time and events himself. Soon he’ll meet the disappointment born of that desire.

DAILY MEDITATION