On these rainy days, I am reading two books that are shaping me more than I expected. Or maybe they are simply putting words to things I already felt.
One of them is Anna Karenina.
I see myself clearly in Levin.
Konstantin Dmitrich Levin is a landowner who spends most of the novel in an existential crisis. He could live off his wealth or take an important role in Moscow. He chooses neither. That life feels wrong to him.
He rejects the modern world. He keeps asking the same question. What is the point of living?
Levin represents a quiet kind of vitalism. His wisdom does not come from ideas or debates. It comes from physical work. During harvest season, when he joins the peasants in the fields, he finds peace. While working, he stops thinking. He stops searching for answers because he no longer needs them.
The other book I am reading is Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Tolstoy and Nietzsche were contemporaries. They probably never read each other. Still, they shared something essential. A deep rejection of rational modern life. A life lived from the head instead of the body.
But they looked in opposite directions.
Nietzsche looked upward. Toward the overman. Toward the creation of new values. Toward saying yes to life in all its cruelty and beauty. His vitalism was aristocratic. Heroic. Vertical.
Levin looked downward. Toward the land. Toward humility. Toward dissolving the ego through work and family. His vitalism was rural. Horizontal. Grounded.
Yet both say the same thing in different ways.
You can only live through action. Never through pure thought. You do not need permission. You do not need justification. What you live is who you are. Nothing more.
The modern trap
Modern culture twists this message.
It tells you that the path to authenticity is knowing yourself. As if you were a fixed object. As if you did not change over time.
That is the trap.
Because if you are always evolving, there is always more work to do. Always another layer to dig into. And as Byung Chul Han puts it:
Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.
You exploit yourself because it is never enough. Because you are never ready.
Kierkegaard saw this coming in the nineteenth century. He called it despair. Infinite reflection that paralyzes you.
His answer was not more analysis. It was the opposite. The leap of faith.
You commit to a way of living. To a decision. Irrationally. You stop weighing options. You jump without a safety net. You suspend judgment and move forward.
Between Nietzsche and Levin
For me, real vitalism lives between Nietzsche and Levin.
Nietzsche reminds you to stop acting like a victim. Stop blaming circumstances. Act in line with what you want.
Levin reminds you to be humble. To accept limits. To value small things. To live simply.
Leaving big questions behind and focusing on living feels like the right response to chaotic times. Focus on what you can control. Take the leap of faith. Let life move again.
No rush. No self exploitation. Just motion.
Life does not wait. And it is only through action that you become someone.
Everything else is suffering.
