Can you trust a vibe?

Hell yeah, says "Anna Karenina"

Hi friends! I’m about to talk about Anna Karenina (which I just finished) and VIBES (which I will define!). But first, I’m going to talk about talking.

When I was a little kid, I had a strong editorial hand in my bedtime stories. My dad was always trying to tell me stories about the Pafufniks, a fictional family capering about, or a lot of times going to sleep—in hindsight I see what he was trying to do there. But I would always stop him when the bedtime story plot started cooking and ask: “But what did they SAY?”

Things have not changed much since. I love a novel where people speak in paragraphs (Detransition, Baby, baby!). I love a PLAY with MONOLOGUES. So it’s a miracle I finished and loved Anna Karenina, because if dialogue has one enemy, it’s Leo Tolstoy.

Like, look at this iconic (to me) Anna sentence, from a club in Moscow where all the male characters briefly hang out together eating, gambling, and going into debt:

Gagin [a rando guy], dropping his voice, told the last good story from Petersburg, and the story, though improper and stupid, was so ludicrous that Levin [a main character] broke into roars of laughter so loud that those near looked round.

Gagin’s story is never shared! This is not unusual. The specifics of what gets said in Anna Karenina just generally… don’t matter. It’s rare to see dialogue in quotation marks, and even rarer that what’s inside of quotation marks impacts the plot.

It seems like this would pose a craft problem for Tolstoy. How are the characters supposed to interact and affect each other, if speech is off the table?

Don’t worry! What Anna Karenina lacks in speech, it makes up for in VIBES—the engine of the novel. Glances, FLUSHES (omg the granular details we get about flushes!), flashing eyes, facial expressions. Body language and non-verbal cues drive everything.

For instance, if you grew up in a Mae Rice Culture of Talking (MRCT) you might think people “tell the truth” with “words.” But here’s a line from Anna Karenina for ya:

What always struck [Levin] in [Kitty]… was the expression of her eyes, soft, serene and truthful.

Yes: She doesn’t tell the truth — it simply comes out of her eyes!

And you might think (again if you are from MRCT) that this would lead to miscommunication. People aren’t mindreaders! You need to use your words and express how you feel and what you want, right?

False. In Anna Karenina, the omniscient narration makes it clear: There is HEAVY consensus around vibes. Early on, there is a scene at a ball where Kitty — who thinks she’s being courted by Vronsky and that they’re about to get engaged — sees Vronsky interacting with titular Anna. She realizes he and Anna are falling in love (which they are) from pure, undiluted vibes.

Behold:

[Kitty] kept watch with a growing pang in her heart. “No, it’s not the admiration of the crowd that has intoxicated [Anna], but the adoration of one. And that one? Can it be [Vronsky]?” Every time he spoke to Anna the joyous light flashed into her eyes, and the smile of happiness curved her red lips. She seemed to make an effort to control herself, to try not to show these signs of delight, but they came out of her face of themselves. “But what of [Vronsky]?” Kitty looked at him and was filled with terror. What was pictured so clearly to Kitty in the mirror of Anna’s face she saw in him… on his face was a look such as Kitty had never seen before… They were speaking of common acquaintances, keeping up the most trivial conversation, but to Kitty it seemed that every word they said was determining their fate and hers.

The words Vronsky and Anna are saying in this scene literally, textually don’t matter. They are “trivial conservation,” a pretext for hanging out together and delighting in transgressive flirty vibes. (Anna is married to another guy!)

The final nail in the coffin of Vronsky and Kitty is an action — so this is not PURE vibes. Later at this same ball, Vronsky asks Anna instead of Kitty to dance the mazurka (a clouty dance, I guess). But Kitty sees it coming from the vibes—and there is no dialogue around their breakup, or the dissolution of their courtship or whatever. No need! All is perfectly, wordlessly clear.

I think there are a few reasons speech is so deemphasized in Anna Karenina. First, I think everyone communicated less directly in old-timey Russia than in the modern U.S. Important information, at least around love and marriage, came in more through rituals (the mazurka) and subtle violations of ritual norms (dancing the mazurka with someone New and Forbidden) than it did through words.

Second, Tolstoy has an ideological agenda, which he reveals at the very end of the book: he’s an evangelical Christian, baby! The novel ends with Levin (widely understood as a stand-in for IRL Tolstoy) realizing that he has been over-intellectualizing his life, and it’s made him depressed and stupid. To be happy, he needs to think less and have more faith in a Christian god.

Talking is a mode of over-intellectualizing, in this paradigm, as are reading and writing. They’re all ways of focusing on your thoughts as opposed to received wisdom on right and wrong as laid out in the BIBLE.

(Question for Tolstoy: is reading the Bible overintellectualizing because it’s reading, or awesome because it’s Bible?)

(Question 2 for Tolstoy: Why are you tempting us into the Sin of Reading with this long ass book?)

Now it’s true you can have too much of anything, including… reasoned thought, I guess. But the book ends in an anti-intellectual in a way I found genuinely off-putting. Like look at this:

Lying on his back, [Levin] gazed up now into the high, cloudless sky. “Do I not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a round arch? But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot see it not round and not bounded, and in spite of my knowing about infinite space, I am incontestably right when I see a solid blue dome, and more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it.”

Here, Levin is seeing the wisdom in trusting his body’s perception of the sky vs. his learned, academic knowledge of the sky. But this pro-vibes stance is too extreme for me. I think it’s “right” and worth knowing that the sky is not a solid blue dome. Especially for pilots!

To Tolstoy’s credit, there are also a few places in Anna Karenina where vibes arguably lead people astray. My personal read of (no spoilers) the famous ending train situation is that it’s a cautionary note about vibes. Your ability to read vibes drops when you’re isolated — too few vibes coming, and you get rusty! — or depressed — all vibes start to seem bad and eternal. Good AND bad interpersonal vibes are situational and fluctuating in Anna.

Except the vibe that Vronsky likes Anna categorically more than Kitty—that one was eternal.

Still, overall, Anna Karenina had a strong pro-vibes stance—and it also rang really, holistically true to me as a piece of literature. The characters, their relationships, their evolution… it was so persuasive that it’s made me reexamine my relationship with vibes!

I think I want to take vibes more seriously, and speech less seriously, especially in situations where words and vibes are all I have to go on. So for instance, if someone is telling me about how happy they are while giving a vibe of despair—alone with myself in my brain, I’ll trust the vibes more.

I don’t see this being a visible process (inadvisable to say “no” when someone tells you they’re happy!), but I think it could be good to assume my mind and body know things I can’t put into words—while also NOT assuming the sky is a blue bowl. We’ll see how this goes! Thanks Anna Karenina!

Q for readers

How do you feel about vibes? Do you trust them at all and if yes, when do you trust them the most?

Also, is this all coming off kind of woo-woo/crystals/anti-vax? I swear I’m crystal neutral and pro vax. Ugh but if my words conflict with my vibes… you should probably trust the vibes!

Mini mailbag — blood relative edition

Two bonus reasons not to kill people from my relatives! Here are the first 11.

From my dad (paraphrased from phone):

I think you forgot the main reason not to kill people, according to Crime & Punishment: empathy. You feel a little bit of their pain, even when you really dislike them, and that’s enough to keep you from killing them.

From Paul, my second cousin in Australia:

Don’t murder in case there is an afterlife. If both victim and perpetrator go to hell, the victim has got a head start on how things work there, and will be so out for revenge!

Linxxx

• Ariana Grande is very Anna Karenina and so are these 2 songs: 1, 2.

• It’s not just me and Tolstoy against speech!

• Randomly found 6 “Closer” remixes all together in a little family.

• The rogue arm makes this soooo much funnier. It’s nothing without the arm.

• I’ll write a research memo about new/scary Trump policies for ya — DM me!