Collage 38

Love and Free Will?

I've got Pierre, Love and Free Will on the brain...

This is from p. 206-207: Pierre is being set up to marry Helene, the conniving Prince Vassily's vacuous daughter; he knows it would be a disaster, but at one point he

"saw and sensed all the loveliness of her body, which was merely covered by clothes."

It's all done for Pierre from there on -

"And at that moment Pierre felt that Hélène not only could, but must be his wife, that it could not be otherwise…he did not even know whether it would be good (he even felt that it was not good for some reason), but he knew that it would be…she already had power over him. And there were no longer any obstructions between them, except for the obstruction of his own will.

And what had happened to him? Nothing. He had simply realized that a woman he had known as a child, of whom he used to say distractedly, “Yes, good-looking,” when told that Hélène was a beauty –he had realized that this woman could belong to him. “But she’s stupid. I’ve said myself that she’s stupid,” he thought.

…terror came over him at the thought that he might already have bound himself in some way to go through with something which was obviously not good and which he ought not to do. But while he expressed this realization to himself, on the other side of his soul her image floated up in all its feminine beauty."

Poor Pierre. He's going to have to go through a dark night of the soul and figure out if there's really such a thing as free will to get out of this one.
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Although this passage is far ahead of the story matching the page from today's image, I like this playful, innocent image of the little boy getting dressed. Pierre seems to be in this innocent fog of believing in goodness (which isn't a bad thing) but he has to wake up or he's just getting tossed around by the will of others. He's also battling lust vs. what he knows deep inside is a bad decision. Whoa. C'mon...haven't we all been there at least once in our lives? ---Lulu

Lynn Waskelis
page 83-84 from original text
made 3/26/10
collage and acrylic paint on paper