Reading breathless claims that technology will free us from death, we may wonder at the refusal to face the fundamental fact of the human condition: Mortals are mortal. Leo Tolstoy, whose descriptions of dying remain unequaled, never ceased to ponder how we might find meaning in the face of our inevitable end.
Long before Tolstoy experienced the psychological crisis that led to his decadeslong effort to rethink Christianity, he was concerned with spiritual questions. Anyone who has read his two great novels, “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” will recall how their heroes wrestle with the same questions that beset the author: Is there something beyond the material world? Does death, which turns our efforts to dust, make life absurd?
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