I am reading Anna Karinina for the first time. I love this early passage:
“Stepan Arkadyich subscribed to and read a liberal newspaper, not an extreme one, but one with the tendency to which the majority held. And though neither science, nor art, nor politics itself interested him, he firmly held the same views on all these subjects as the majority and his newspaper did, and changed them only when the majority did, or, rather, he did not change them, but they themselves changed imperceptibly in him.”
Tolstoy understood us. I get now why Faulkner called this the greatest novel ever written. I’m also glad I waited till middle age to read it; I would not have understood it, or cared to figure it out, if I were younger.