Yesterday, after I finished writing about Catton, I went into my bedroom and lay down. I forgot about everything and cleared my mind and about an hour later, I got up to go back into the main room and as I stood in the doorway I had a moment of anxiety. "What am I going to read now?" It had been four months since I read anything else but Catton. I quickly scanned the floor (my “horizontal book shelf”), picked up the small, thick copy of War And Peace, sat again at my desk and flopped the book open to a random page, Book II, chapter 21, page 568. 

I had forgotten the detail, the incredible amount of detail that Leo Tolstoy provides in every scene (it is, after all, why the book is 1400 pages long). It is as if Tolstoy was there--no, that's too human, it is like the Arnolfini Portrait, there is never an end to the detail and you see beyond human sensory capacity. And page 568 was just a random flopping. I was going to say "insignificant" but there is nothing insignificant in War and Peace, or in the Arnolfini Portrait, or in Remembrance of Things Past which so resembles War and Peace. Tolstoy describes Prince Andrei's approach to Natasha in a crowded room at a card game and what Prince Andrei saw from this angle, then from that:

She was sitting by her sister at the tea table, and reluctantly, without even looking at him, making some reply to Boris, who sat down beside her.

what Pierre saw from his angle of Prince Andrei and Natasha;

Prince Andrei was standing before her, saying something to her with a look of guarded tenderness. She had raised her head and was looking up at him, blushing, and visibly trying to control her rapid breathing.

Prince Andrei went up to Pierre, and Pierre noticed a new and youthful epression in his friend's face.

What Tolstoy, the omniscient narrator, saw:

Pierre changed places several times...sitting now with his back to Natasha, now facing her, and...continued to observe her and his friend.

After six rubbers the general got up, saying that it was no use playing like that, and Pierre was released. Natasha had turned aside and was talking to Sonya and Boris. ...

War and Peace is writing beyond normal human capacity. I have found my next book.