Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries Book

When Tolstoy had a Massive Enlightenment experience in mid age, his illusions were irreparably shattered.

He saw clearly now that he had goofed up - big time - with War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the very blockbusters that had made him a worldwide household name.

Like Sartre, the irruption of the Absurd had set his world - and his Very Fame - on its head. And Tolstoy knew he had had it all wrong.

For his vision of a happy family was based on a petit bourgeois sham, as Sartre saw.

Instead of all happy families now being the same, as in 'Anna', all 'happy' families were now just 'keeping up with appearances' and making do.

And yet pop Christianity puts the 'nuclear family' on a pedestal...

No, Tolstoy thought - unhappy couples trying to make their marriages WORK are the Happy Ones! The Lord does the rest.

So, you see, unlike Sartre, Tolstoy had found HOPE. It's basic Taoism. Work alongside things taking their natural course - with a Faith that they'll work out!

But Tolstoy was a towering Genius, and thus had a Daemon within him that wanted to subvert 'normal' faith.

So he opposed the national church. He supported splinter groups like Canada's immigrant Dukhubors.

He wreaked merry mayhem in Czarist Russia, and even this whole polite planet was too small for his raging iconoclasm!

Now, let me ask you: if you rifle through the online discussions here on GR any night of the week, whadaya see?

I'll tell you.

You see traditionalists opposing modernists.

You see Hegelian dialectics disturbingly at work, breaking structures down - and building New Ones up.

You see people speaking their minds.

You see Tolstoyan conflicts playing out and resolving themselves.

In short, you see PERSONAL GROWTH.

Get it? Tolstoy NEVER stopped growing!

And neither should WE, folks.

Want a gripping coming-of-Age autobiography about a great man finally facing off - and Coming Clean - with HIMSELF?

And REFUSING to compromise, failing and being laughed at - but Always getting up again?

Read THIS. It's beautiful.

And it's so US.