March 23
Karataev took life as it came — the way rain falls. He did not complain, he did not choose; he lived whatever the day brought him.
War and Peace (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Karataev took life as it came — the way rain falls. He did not complain, he did not choose; he lived whatever the day brought him.
When someone asks you in the evening how your day was, what went wrong often comes to mind first. The train was late, an appointment was postponed, the conversation you had been looking forward to was brief. Each of these small things is measured against a day you had roughly pictured in the morning. That day never existed. Even so, it serves as your yardstick.
When you complain, you are in this sense keeping faith with a draft. That is not merely petty. Your wishes were in the imagined day, and someone who never compares may also wish for less.
Wishes, though, point forward. Complaint holds on to them when their moment has already passed, and beside this double the real day always looks somewhat poorer. Whatever it held of its own does not appear in this reckoning, because it was nowhere in the draft.
The next morning you draft another day, and that is as it should be. It only gets difficult in the evening, when you are supposed to say which of the two was yours.
