Great Christmas Reading

While I wait for my son to finish processing the video presentation I modestly star in, a film sure to win an Oscar and bump Brad Pitt right off the screen, I spend my time reading.

Yesterday my e-friend Felisol in Norway (at On The Far Side Of The Sea, http://felisol.blogspot.com/ ) asked me about a story by Count Leo Tolstoy, one of the world’s greatest writers.

Here is a photo of the Count as a young man in 1854:

Does that photo resemble anyone you know?

Maybe a certain movie star?

A complex and confused man, Tolstoy wrote War And Peace, Anna Karenina, and many other great works of literature, as well as scores of profound short stories.

In spite of his literary success and critical acclaim, for a time he grew suicidal.

He said, “I abnormally developed pride and an insane assurance that it was my vocation to teach men—without knowing what (to teach)… My life came to a standstill… the truth was that life is meaningless. And it was then that I, a man favored by fortune, hid a cord from myself lest I should hang myself… and I ceased to go out shooting with a gun lest I should be tempted by so easy a way of ending my life.”

Yet, in 1870, his diary says, “I knelt down and prayed; and as I prayed I just knew there was a God. . Then I remembered the Gospel of John that I had read, and how it seemed to be written by an eye-witness, and I knew that if that was so, then Jesus was the Son of God and I was saved!”

That spiritual experience colored the rest of his life and is reflected in many of his writings.

Here’s a photo of him taken later in life:

I searched and found the story Felistol wants to read. It is one of Tolstoy’s finest. It’s named : “Where Love Is…” The text is at http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Tolstoy.html .

If anyone is interested in one of my own Christmas stories, I recommend “Graverdigger’s Christmas” a true tale of something that happened to me and my family back in the mid 1970s. It forms a chapter in my book of the same name. The on-line text is at:

http://www.cowart.info/John%27s%20Books/Gravedigger%27s%20Xmas/Gravedigger%27s%20Christmas.htm

Now, I may not write like Tolstoy, but I am beginning to look like him—

In that later photograph.