'The Same Acute Sensitivity'

“My 66^th birthday. I still have all my old energy and passion, the same acute sensitivity and, I am told, the same youthful appearance.”

It’s nice when husbands and wives are temperamentally matched. In this case, as Sofia Tolstoy reveals in her diary entry for Aug. 20, 1910, she is as gifted at self-delusion as her spouse, the great novelist, occasional crank and husband manqué. Her next sentence reins in the hallucinatory self-assessment a little: “But these past two months have aged me considerably and, God willing, have brought me closer to my end.” That’s more like it. When Joseph Epstein proposed a Nobel Prize for Marriage, awarded to writerly spouses “who have long suffered in difficult unions and stuck it out to the lugubrious end,” he writes confidently that Countess Tolstoy was “a shoo-in.”

Today I reach the countess’ age, sixty-six, or, as a friend recently put it, “Now you’re on Route 66.” At this age, Maimonides, Conrad and Auden died. I’m not quite ready for that. Writing is still the next logical step after reading and thinking.

[The quoted sentences are from The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy (trans. Cathy Porter, Jonathan Cape, 1985).]