Seeing Double

I was reading Anna Karenina last night, and a phrase of Tolstoy's struck me: It's the morning after Anna informs her husband about her affair with Vronsky, and whereas just after she came clean she felt startling clarity about her future and her new position in life, in the morning she suddenly feels as though she has done everything wrong and there is no more hope-
"She felt that everything was beginning to go double in her soul, as an object sometimes goes double in tired eyes. Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know."
How does Tolstoy KNOW? I just can't get over these descriptions of these states of mind... and I guess the amazement lies not in that he knows, but in that he has this ability to describe it so perfectly.

Sometimes, I think this happens to me. It's really disconcerting. For example - now that I've explored most of the lake in my kayak, I can just go out and float around, looking at clouds and the water and the buildings that I can see through the trees... and I get struck by these feelings that the only thing that is real in the entire picture is the earth and the sky. I can't quite capture the feeling because I'm not stuck in it right now, but essentially, it's at times like these where I start to feel like I, myself, don't quite exist. I'm dust on the wind. Intangible, unimportant, insignificant. True, true, and true - but I think that at some point, you have to throw up mental glass barriers. Define the limits of your world, and ascribe meaning (on this level, I can understand the creation of religions, to some degree) otherwise you're just floating in space, alone. That's not to say that I now think it's necessary to invent a deity to give my life meaning, because I have no problem with being a product of evolution and *not* having a god-given purpose - I'm just saying that when I let down my mental barriers and put myself in the universe, I feel blurred. Maybe one day I'll learn to deal with this and from it I'll be able to garner great wisdom (:P), but in the meantime, it kind of freaks me out. It's like I try to look at myself and I see double (yeah Tolstoy!).

In other news (and sort of related - at least in my head), the other day I had lunch with a girl in my geos class, and we were talking about the weird dynamic that we perceive exists at Wellesley - the drive to simultaneously be better than any man and also to be the best woman possible (cough. That's not exactly what it is. I just don't know how to put it into words), and yet - I can't shake this feeling that the truly important things in life revolve around love. Wellesley wants us to go forth into the world and be the next CEOs, the next leaders of the world, and part of me can't help but think that while there are definitely very many valuable things to do in the world, what does it mean if you have no one to share it with? If I devote my life to saving the world, but never have love, that seems like a waste. At the same time though - if I find love and don't try to do all that I can to save the world, isn't that also a waste? Perhaps a bigger waste? (and by waste, I mean... I don't really know what I'm trying to say here. I'm trying to explain it to myself. I don't mean "WASTE" like garbage... I just mean that there are things that I feel like I have to do, and if I don't, then, well, something is wrong.)

It all comes back to this whole mortality thing. I think that my understanding of this basic fact is what makes me think such strange things sometimes... like - let's say that I'm going to live to be 100 years old (woo!). That means that basically, at this time, I have lived one whole fifth of my life. It's gone. I can't have it back. I have memories, sure! But after my life, after I die, that's it. I can't go back and live this again. I don't know what happens after, if anything at all, but man, this is it. I've got one chance to make every mistake and fix it. One chance to say everything that needs to be said (when I put it like that, all of my wishy-washy indecision seems glaringly pathetic), one chance to be me.
Or maybe this is all a little melodramatic - certainly you get more than once chance for many things within your lifetime, but on a larger scale, in the sense that you can't go back and re-do your life, you've got one chance to live.

Hmm. I think it's time to go immerse myself in some italian busy work.