A Deal with the Devil Against Boredom

Popular culture has absorbed the concept of the “Faustian bargain,” even if few people know the term. The basic Faustian plot has the main character (Faust, or Dr. Faustus) trading his soul to the devil in return for fame, riches, or power. The story then explores what those things do to him, usually discovering that what he thought he wanted doesn't live up to what he imagined. Eventually the story arrives at the inevitable climax of how Faust can wiggle out of his end of the bargain.

The plot has sunk into the common consciousness and has appeared in everything from a Simpsons Halloween episode to movies such as The Devil's Advocate and Bedazzled, and even in songs, with a variation of the theme in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

Interestingly, in Goethe's version of Faust (multiple writers have picked up the theme over the centuries) his protagonist doesn't make the bargain because he wants riches or fame. Instead he makes a deal with the devil because he is bored.

More precisely, Goethe’s Faust is so dissatisfied with the limits of ordinary human existence that he contemplates suicide.  Mephistopheles, sensing an opportunity, offers him the chance to experience everything life has to offer. So Faust bets his soul that Mephistopheles still won’t be able to give him a moment satisfying enough that he’d want it to last forever.

Goethe’s meandering two-part play then has Mephistopheles throwing the obvious temptations at him like lust, riches, power. Faust is “meh,” until he finally finds something that does matter to him: the possibility of creating something lasting and beneficial for mankind, something that will outlive him. After that, the rest of the story becomes what happens after Faust is no longer bored and has found something worth living for, and how he escapes his end of the bargain.

Two hundred years later, Goethe’s book is pedantic, strange, and pretty obscure. So what struck me when reading it in the 21^st century was not Faust, the various inducements, or even Mephistopheles, who is often more interesting than the protagonist. It was the existential boredom that made a deal with the devil possible.

And my first thought reading this was that current generations have made their own modern Faustian bargain against boredom. And the devil today is of course the smartphone in your pocket. And a lot of people have given up living real lives in return for not feeling bored.

Waiting in line? Phone.

Commercial break? Phone.

Can’t fall asleep? Phone.

Eating lunch alone? Phone.

Feeling lonely, restless, or vaguely dissatisfied? Phone.

Do that long enough and you start training yourself to expect something interesting every few seconds. Ordinary life begins to feel empty and creates a negative feedback loop of filling that emptiness with more internet time. The more often you use constant stimulation to escape boredom, loneliness, or uncomfortable thoughts, the less capable you become of simply sitting with those things. Which makes you reach for the stimulation even faster the next time.

Now I use the internet every day. The question isn’t whether someone uses it, or browses, or goes on social media. The question is how much of a life is spent there, and what you do the moment you aren’t being actively entertained.

I was in my late 30s before the internet was ubiquitous, so I seem largely immune to selling my soul for online nirvana. And I’m still conscious of not using the internet during idle time. I’m the guy in line at the grocery store not looking at his phone, instead looking at everything around me and wondering: how long has the cashier worked here? Is this a career or a part-time job? Do employees get a discount? 

That kind of idle noticing used to be the default. For society at large, and especially for younger generations with no memory of pre-internet and no practice sitting with boredom, I don’t know how society teaches it back.

The internet isn’t going away. Other than people like me setting an example of living outside it, and posting observations like this that maybe ten people will read, there may not be a neat solution.

The old stories obsess over how Faust gets out of the contract. The modern version may be bleaker because if all of society progresses to where it can’t bear three minutes without stimulation, there doesn’t need a Mephistopheles to come collect. 

War and Peace: Yes, It Should Be on Your Bucket Reading List

My retirement as a “gentleman squire” has included learning classical piano and getting around to reading those Great Works of Literature I never had time to read while working. I actually did a pretty good job of tackling Crime and Punishment, Paradise Lost and a few other classics while still in the work trenches, but I was overwhelmed the first time I tried Tolstoy, and waited until retirement to give him another try.

There are thousands of reviews by learned scholars out there, so I'll focus on a layman's review: what I expected from the book's reputation versus what it was actually like to read.

It’s Long!

Yes, it is! But here’s the interesting part: there is rarely a chapter over ten minutes long. It is basically a collection of A LOT of short chapters, so it isn't like you have to carve out hours at a time to read it. You can actually read one or two chapters at a time for 15 minutes a day and get through it in a couple of months.

There Are Hundreds of Characters!

Not quite true. There are about ten major characters and another two dozen or so who support them. The “hundreds” mostly come from the historical figures who drift in and out of the story. Some you already know, like Napoleon. Others you get to know as you go, particularly the Russian and French military leadership. And then there are lots of politicians, generals and other historical figures mentioned literally once in passing.

There is no need to keep a cheat sheet.

The harder part is the Russian names. People can have a formal name, a social name, and a diminutive used in personal circumstances. So Andrey Nikolayevich, Prince Andrey, and Andryusha are all the same person. I will admit that reading The Brothers Karamazov first made this much easier as this naming convention was drilled into my head with that reading experience. 

It’s About Napoleon’s Invasion and Retreat from Russia!

Well, the back half of the book is, and that is where I found it most interesting.

The first half sets up all the characters through a lot of social and parlor settings, along with the events leading up to the Russian invasion. Some of that was mildly interesting, some of it was downright funny, and some of the romance and high-society drama dragged.

But the book has a sort of “Forrest Gump” quality to it. It follows a relatively small group of Russian aristocrats who go out into the world and keep running into major historical events and people. One character meets Napoleon, another meets the Russian Czar, another major military figures. These fictional people are essentially wandering through actual history.

That was one of my favorite aspects of the book. The historical scenes and battles are what really made it for me, although I did feel a bit bogged down in the salon and romance drama between Austerlitz and Napoleon’s invasion, including an extended hunting scene and Christmas scene.  But hey, "Peace" is in the title too.

Tolstoy Goes Off on History Lectures!

This is true.

“Professor Tolstoy” makes periodic appearances to expound on his theory of history, rejecting the “Great Man” arguments that had grown up around Napoleon. Tolstoy argues, essentially, that great historical events emerge from the actions of countless individuals and circumstances rather than being directed by a single extraordinary figure.

These side diversions reminded me a bit of the whale-lecture chapters in Moby-Dick. They are mildly interesting and often fairly short, although the second Epilogue which ends the book, and after the story ends, is a different matter. It is a lengthy philosophical essay that I admit I mostly skimmed.

You Need an Encyclopedia to Read It!

True, but that was half the fun, and it is much easier with the internet these days.

During the battle scenes, I literally had something like a 5:1 Wikipedia-to-book ratio as I went down historical rabbit holes.

“Who was this general?”

“What happened to him after the war? OMG, he was executed?!”

“What do modern historians say about Austerlitz?”

“What do they say about Borodino?”

And so on.

The book basically incited me to do deep historical reading on the Napoleonic Wars, what led up to them, and their aftermath. I ended up learning as much about the actual history surrounding the novel as I did from the novel itself. Totally fascinating, but again, I am a retired guy without a job, and I understand that at this stage of life one either gets into military history or smoking meats.

And Then There’s Pierre

Besides the war history, I found the moral struggles and life arc of Pierre, one of the major characters, extremely fascinating. His story gives you the existential Russian literature experience you expect, although not quite on the scale of Dostoyevsky.

And that may ultimately be what surprised me most about the book. I went into War and Peace expecting an enormous historical epic about Napoleon and Russia. I got that, but I also got a novel about people trying to figure out what the hell they are supposed to do with their lives.

Overall, a very enjoyable read, with some patience required here and there and a calendar commitment. At roughly 1,500 pages, plus all the fascinating encyclopedia research it inspired, it is certainly a major project.

But yes: War and Peace belongs on the bucket reading list, but I rank it below Dostoyevsky's two major novels and better than Anna Karenina, but read that one first to get your Tolstoy training wheels.

Anna Karenina Review: Anna's Story Provides the Drama, Levin's Journey Provides the Meaning.

Upon retiring 18 months ago I entered my "Russian Literature Stage," starting with The Brothers Karamazov (amazing) and, after a needed mental break, deciding to next read Anna Karenina as "Tolstoy training wheels" before tackling War and Peace. As with all foreign literature, I did a lot of research on the best translation and settled on the Bartlett translation from Oxford World Classics, which has excellent footnotes. I also used my favorite AI during the reading as a study guide for Russian history, nineteenth-century culture, and even as a sounding board whenever I ran into surprising plot twists or shocking dialogue I just had to share, sort of a digital book club companion.

Now I had certainly heard of the book and knew it regularly appeared on lists of the greatest novels ever written, but I knew absolutely nothing about the plot. I went in completely blind, so I had no clue what to expect. After wading through over 100 pages without the title character even appearing, I was quickly pulled into the primary storyline, a love triangle with all the spiciness of a telenovela.

The novel is psychologically extraordinary. Tolstoy's greatest gift is making me sympathize with people I often disagreed with. I found myself feeling sorry for the jilted husband Karenin despite his coldness, understanding Anna despite increasingly disagreeing with her choices, recognizing her lover Vronsky's growing sense of entrapment, and ultimately admiring the secondary protagonist Levin's earnest search for meaning. Very few novels have left me feeling compassion for nearly everyone while also acknowledging that each contributed to the tragedy.

What surprised me most, however, was not the affair but the structure. I expected a novel called Anna Karenina to center on the title character from beginning to end. Instead, she doesn't appear for over 100 pages, and after she departs the novel, Tolstoy spends roughly another 100 pages without any of the love triangle participants at all. At first this felt strange, but I suspect it reflects Tolstoy's larger point: individual tragedy does not stop the world, the world simply moves on.

The secondary protagonist Levin ultimately became the character I related to most. His tendency to enjoy life while living it, but despair when trying to intellectually deconstruct it, felt remarkably familiar. His struggles with mortality, faith, and meaning resonated deeply, particularly following my own experiences with a near-fatal accident, the sudden death of my brother, and more recently waiting for medical test results.

Anna's mental decline was equally impressive. Rather than presenting madness as a sudden break, Tolstoy shows an intelligent mind gradually becoming trapped within its own interpretations. Her stream of consciousness near the end felt strikingly modern, anticipating the literary style of James Joyce by more than half a century.

My one criticism of the book is the frequent "side quests" Tolstoy takes into subjects that clearly interested him and probably his readers at a time when there wasn't an endless stream of entertainment competing for their attention. There are long passages on farming, hunting, Russian politics, and current events such as a conflict involving the Ottoman Empire, all of which became eye-glazing. While many of these sections enriched my understanding of nineteenth-century Russia and ultimately served larger thematic purposes, I often found myself wishing for a firmer editorial hand.

Comparing it with The Brothers Karamazov, I found Dostoevsky's novel the more compelling reading experience. Dostoevsky openly wrestles with philosophy and religion through dramatic confrontation. Tolstoy embeds those same questions within everyday life. Anna Karenina often resembles a domestic drama or nineteenth-century soap opera on the surface while quietly exploring profound questions underneath. I admired that subtlety, though I responded more immediately to Dostoevsky's directness.

Overall, I understand why Anna Karenina is considered one of the greatest novels ever written, although I would currently rank it below any Dostoevsky I've read (including Crime and Punishment). We'll see where Tolstoy ultimately lands after I finish War and Peace. Anna Karenina is less interested in telling a story than in recreating an entire world and exploring how ordinary lives contain extraordinary moral and psychological depth.

Ironically, the novel's central love triangle was what kept me reading. I kept guessing where the drama was headed and never got it right. But it was Levin's quiet spiritual awakening that stayed with me after I closed the book. In other words, Anna's story provides the drama, while Levin's journey provides the meaning.

After My Brother's Funeral

My younger, only brother dropped dead of a massive stroke at only 56.  He had high blood pressure, was way overweight, and ignored going to the doctor. "I’ll be fine”.  He wasn’t, and many who knew him are as much angry as sad as this was likely preventable.  He left a wife of 30 years and three kids, two in college, one who will be a senior in high school.

Although less than two years apart, we were never very close.  After fighting like cats and dogs as kids, we basically kept our own lives from adolescence since we were so temperamentally different.  I was the brainy introspective kid, he the partying social animal.  I drove myself through college and launched a corporate career.  He wandered through two colleges, did a bit of this and that after graduating, and in his 30s finally got a vision and became a criminal lawyer of all things.  He was no bleeding heart - he would say he never had an innocent client, but many overcharged ones - but it was the fun, excitement and the game in the courtroom.  He’d be at a jail and two different courtrooms on the same day.

But while never that close he’d be there at the end of the phone and at holidays.  We’d pick up conversations where we left off after three months like it was three days.  We had a historical shorthand for our deceased parents, family lore, that crazy family vacation to Disneyland in 1977.  And we had each other's back because that’s what brothers do.  

But "I just got back from my brother’s funeral" was not a sentence I was expecting to be saying any time soon, potentially never for a younger brother.  He joins a growing list of dead family members that include my parents, nearly all my aunts and uncles (two left at 90), several cousins.  Like I wrote before, those pictures of family gatherings from not that long ago now have few living people in them, and in many of them I am the only one left in a big group.

The thing about a sibling is that they are one of the few people who remember your opening chapters. Friends arrive later. Spouses arrive later. Even your own children only know an adult, curated version of you. But a brother remembers the house, the parents, the fights, the vacations, the embarrassments, and the family myths that nobody else quite understands, which is why this loss will be different from anyone else.

Proust "In Search of Lost Time", Book 1 ("Swann's Way") Review

Following is an AI generated review of the first book (of 7) of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", considered one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written.  I used the AI as a study guide asking questions, digging into subjects, getting clarification or historical background, then at the end told it to generate a review based on our conversation. 

Note: Translation version is important.  If interested read the Davis one pictured.

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Reading Proust was unlike reading almost anything else. The prose is often beautiful, poetic, and packed with insight, but it can also wander for pages at a time. I found that trying to follow every sentence analytically was exhausting. The better approach was often to let the prose wash over me and allow the accumulation of impressions, observations, and images to build into something larger.

What stayed with me most was not the famous madeleine scene, but Proust's observations about memory, desire, and the symbols we create in our minds. Again and again he shows how people, places, music, and objects become invested with meanings far beyond their reality. The sections on Swann's obsession, jealousy, and eventual disillusionment were particularly powerful, at times feeling surprisingly modern in their understanding of rumination, uncertainty, projection, and self-deception.

Perhaps most remarkable were Proust's psychological insights. Writing before many modern psychological concepts had entered popular consciousness, he describes patterns of thought that feel strikingly contemporary. At various points I found myself recognizing what we might now call rumination, pathological doubt, obsessive thinking, idealization, and the tendency to construct elaborate inner worlds around people and possibilities. More than once I had the feeling that he was describing mental experiences with a precision that would not seem out of place in a modern psychology text.

I was less captivated by some of the lengthy social and aristocratic maneuvering, and there were stretches that required patience. But just when I felt Proust had drifted too far afield, he would produce a paragraph so perceptive that I had to stop and reread it.

More than a novel of events, this is a novel of consciousness. It reminded me how memory reshapes people and places, how we turn others into symbols, and how much of life is spent inhabiting worlds created by our own minds. Proust's greatest subject may not be memory itself, but the distance between reality and the meanings we attach to it. 

Challenging at times, but ultimately a rewarding read and full of insights that linger long after the book is finished.