What I Learned From Tolstoy About Wine And Love

What I Learned From Tolstoy About
Wine, Love, And The Ides Of March

When I was young, there were moments
when my imagination would soar into those
clouds of the mind, and I would dream of
love and romance. I saw love then as a
mysterious force boardering on the super-
natural. Love was something magical, when
two people became attracted to one another;
an internal mechanism seemed to have been
let loose inside of nature.

During this time period in my life, I would
lock myself for hours behind closed doors,
light candles in my room, reading poetry
and sonnets in the midnight darkness; viewing
the room and stars through the lens of some
medieval world. I saw the moss that forms
around walls in the primeval darkness, the
beauty of the nightime sky. My appearance
was often as one distressed, and my clothes
were thrown together in the most careless of
manner. When daybreak would arrive, I
would climb back down into my open window,
and sit at the breakfast table, gazing at my
cereal in the dull listless expression of bore-
dom.

In those days, I read a great deal of the
classical romantic poets. Poets such as Byron
and Shelly were some of my favorites, and
my dreams were filled with those of the
melancholy; running into lands inhabited by
Coleridge, Shakespeare, and Spenser. How
often that I rode that fabled ship of an Ancient
Mariner, riding on the waves of a storm by
Coleridge......Dances around waltzes filled my
nightime slumbers, and my imagination saw
love in my surroundings, nature, as rivers
rushed past the currents of my imagination,
and the winds of Aeoles blown from winter's
arctic north froze my soul with passion. Mad-
ness has been said to travel on the same
journey as those of lovers. Love can bring
a person to such heights; for the mansion of
love has many mansions containing numerous
rooms. Love reaches towards the heavens.
Such is the state of the mind of a person in
love. So, I walked the path of destiny designed by love, and I walked
for many
days.

She was a professor at Duke University
dressed impecably. When Alexandra Petrovitch came
into my life, I felt that the muse of beauty
had descended from some haunted realm.
My poetic attributions had reached fullfillment.
We would live as the traveling literary bohemia
of the thirties; for we were in love, and the
age was ours. I would soon find that being in
love was in actuality different from the poems
of my Percy Shelly or William Shakespeare.
There were a great many things about the
practicality of love that Lord Byron had never
conveyed in meaning towards the end of
those marvelous cantos and lines.

I had discovered that there were many
problems to taking a woman to bed. For one
thing women are messy, and they have a
tendency to smell a great deal. Hot melting
skin soon begins to taste like salt, and the
reality of making love in bed is a far cry from
the "crimson white skin" and "gently heaving
bosoms" of a Don Juanian saga. Samuel
Taylor Coleridge probably never had to deal
with the critiques from the modern sexually
liberated woman.

"A little to the left.....To the right would
be better......speed up you're moving too
slow."

Gone were the deep sultry sighs of passion or
heaving emotional gasps of eternally bound
emotional transcendence. The reality of
going to bed was hard, brutal, and resembled
something more like an aerobics contest.

It was the month of October. By then, the
dead leaves had found a carpet of decaying
earth upon the ground. I saw the beauty of
the seasons felt the crispness of the air,
saw teh moving in the winter clouds of dawn.
The colors of winter seemed to arise in an
air arrayed in blues crimson whites; while I
noticed the whole spectrum of nature's divers-
ity. I soon found that the reality of love proved to be far more
different from the
musaic cast dream spells, for love had
limitations. Our first night of passion seemed
to be the end of those dreams spun by the
French philosophers and poets of an earlier
century. Those dreams spun by the poets
swirled around in the coldness of winter. The
closing of doors on the illusion of love had
begun. They really ended the next morning
at the breakfast table.

"When are you going to get a job ? All
that you ever do is lie around on the coach
sleeping all day long."

There was no Beatrice at the end of my
chosen rainbow. I heard no chimes from
heaven in the ides of march. A full sink of
dishes rested in the sink unattended, and
melted candle-wax was the only remanent
from the candle burning a soft blue flame,
as the soft music of jazz had carried us, ever
so softly into the silent world of dreams. I
remember sitting on Alexandra's coach, as we
discussed our relationship. I often think of
this conversation as "the proverbial last day."
There was a sense of sulleness in the final
hours of one sultry hot summer afternoon.

"We don't have a relationship, Robert.
All that you do is read all day. Why don't
you ever leave the house or something ?"

"I am a writer Alexandra , reading is one of
the things that I am supposed to do to be-
come a good writer."

"Then, why don't you become a struggling
writer in some of the coffee shops downtown ?
Why do you constantly hang out here ?"

"I want to be with you Alexandra. Is there
something the matter with that ?"

"No. I just can't have you hanging out
here 24-7."

She then began to throw objects across the
room in horrendous fashion.

"Alexandra, are you all-right ?"

"Do I look all right...", she screamed,
as she continued to throw more objects
around the room screaming at the top of
her lungs, pacing back and forth in a most
angry and manic fashion. A glass of water
fell to the hardwood living room floor with
a crash.

Tolstoy once wrote in "War and Peace",

"the science of the whole, the science
into one's soul....the light of God, called
conscience."

For me, the Ides of March fell with the
suddeness of youth forever. Love was the
secret; a tale of the fairy to be found. I
had wandered in the desert and found no
oasis. Love remained unfathomable in its'
dimensions. It was much more than candle-
light dinners carried by the winery over song
from another enchanted evening.