I was sitting on a beach in San Francisco the other day talking with someone about how most philosophy converges to the same conclusion (or rather, lack of a conclusion). It was freezing, obviously, because it’s San Francisco and the Pacific doesn’t care about your romantic notions of California. We had a bottle of wine that was too cold to taste like anything. The fog was doing what fog does there, erasing the horizon line between certainty and void, and perhaps this is what turned our talk toward Nietzsche, Camus, Kierkegaard, Hesse.

I kind of realised how each of them (although admittedly not Hesse, as this was proffered by the other participant in the conversation, and I’m not sure I’ve actually read enough Hesse to comment) by different paths through different darknesses, arrives at essentially the same clearing: Look, we cannot reason our way out of the fundamental absurdity of being thrown into existence. We didn’t discover, backing out from first principles, the algorithm for how to live. So instead, you circle the question like a sculptor circling marble, you attack the space around it with all the resolve you can muster, and you learn (if you’re lucky / brave enough) to make of that very absurdity a kind of home.

This conversation, dissolving as it did into the larger dissolution of surf and mist, made me think about the greatest work I’ve encountered that also holds this terrible question without answering it. Or rather, that makes of the question itself a living thing. And I don’t know why I’m being coy about it because you’ve read the title: it’s Anna Karenina.

Here’s the thing about Tolstoy. He doesn’t give you philosophy’s abstract comfort of accepting absurdity. Instead he gives you human bodies moving through drawing rooms and train stations, trying and failing and trying again to solve the unsolvable equation of how to be both authentic and connected. Both free and loved. The novel becomes a kind of proof by exhaustion, not that there’s an answer, but that the question penetrates every gesture of our lives, from the way we butter our bread to the way we throw ourselves under trains.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The opening line has become so familiar we risk overlooking what it’s actually saying: that happiness is singular while suffering is infinite. But as the novel unfolds, you discover something worse. Even happiness contains the seeds of its own particular anguish. Tolstoy’s method isn’t to tell us that existence is absurd but to show us characters living inside that absurdity, each attempting their own desperate geometry around the unanswerable question.

I should confess something here. I first read this book because a girl I was dating in undergrad said she loved it, and I wanted to be able to talk about it with her. Classic. I think I understood maybe 40% of what was happening, emotionally speaking. The Russian names blurred together. But something stuck. And then I read it again this year, in a completely different life, and it was a completely different book waiting for me.

I don’t know what this essay is, by the way. I run an ML startup. I spend my days thinking about loss functions and evaluation frameworks. Writing literary criticism about nineteenth-century Russian novels is not in my job description. But I like writing, and I think about this book a lot, and I’m going to do it anyway. Consider this my own small refusal to stand in the corner.

Here’s what those philosophers on the beach understood that Tolstoy also knew: the alternative to engaging with life’s unanswerability—choosing nihilism, suicide, protective cynicism—is itself just another arbitrary answer to the question. And an aesthetically impoverished one at that.

It’s like that meme of someone standing in the corner at a party, arms crossed, thinking “They don’t know that all this partying and socialising is meaningless.” Meanwhile everyone else could just as easily think: “He doesn’t know that his withdrawal is just as arbitrary as our engagement, and far less beautiful.”

Camus explicitly rejects suicide as philosophical cowardice. Nietzsche scorns the last men who have given up on greatness. Kierkegaard mocks those who think they’ve found easy answers in either faith or doubt. I’m going to be honest: I’ve read The Myth of Sisyphus properly, most of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and like forty pages of Fear and Trembling before getting distracted. So take my synthesis with appropriate salt. But they do seem to be blind men touching different parts of the same elephant—Camus more egalitarian in his rebellion, Nietzsche more aristocratic in his will to power, Kierkegaard more indirect in his faithful leap. All insisting on the same thing: keep touching, keep groping in the dark, keep attacking the space around the question even though you’ll never answer it.

The act of engagement itself becomes the only non-arbitrary response to arbitrariness.

I don’t know if I fully believe that. But I believe it enough to keep going.

The conventional reading positions Anna and Levin as opposing answers to the question. Passion versus duty. Destruction versus creation. The city versus the land. But this binary collapses pretty quickly if you actually pay attention. Anna and Levin aren’t opposites. They’re variations on the same theme. Both are seekers circling the same impossible marble. Both cannot accept the given world. Both experience moments of suicidal despair. Both glimpse something beyond the veil of ordinary existence that renders that existence simultaneously precious and unbearable.

The difference isn’t in their choices. It’s not even really in their morality. It’s in what they do when they realise there’s no right answer. Levin keeps attacking the space despite his doubts. Anna, tragically, stops.

Consider Anna’s first appearance at the Moscow railway station, where she successfully reconciles Dolly and Stiva after his infidelity. Here’s Anna at her most vital: a force of restoration, mending the very kind of breach she’ll later create. Yet even in this moment of social triumph, death announces itself. A worker crushed beneath the train. “It’s a bad omen,” Anna says. We tend to read this as foreshadowing her own death. But the omen runs deeper.

The very rails that connect us, the structures of marriage, family, society that make civilisation possible, are also the machinery that crushes us. We need these structures to live, and they’re what destroys us. The train that brings Anna to Moscow to heal one marriage will carry her into the affair that destroys her own. The rails are the question itself.

I think about this sometimes when I’m on BART, which is perhaps too on-the-nose.

The novel’s architecture reinforces the paradox through its parallel plots. While Anna descends into jealous obsession with Vronsky, Levin ascends toward spiritual revelation through marriage to Kitty. But Tolstoy subverts your expectation of moral judgment. Levin’s happiness isn’t a reward for virtue any more than Anna’s destruction is punishment for sin.

This is important, and I think a lot of readers miss it.

Levin succeeds because he maintains his commitment to attacking the space around the question, even when he finds no answers. His religious revelation at the novel’s end isn’t a solution (he admits he’ll continue doubting) but a decision to continue engaging despite the doubt. Anna’s tragedy is that she believed a right answer existed, and when she couldn’t find it, when the contradictions became unbearable, she chose withdrawal. She becomes the nihilist in the corner of the party. Convinced that her non-engagement is somehow more honest than everyone else’s arbitrary dancing.

I’ve been Anna. More times than I’d like to admit. Not in the affair sense, but in the sense of believing there was a right configuration. That if I just thought hard enough, optimised well enough, I could find the answer that would make everything cohere. Love and freedom. Authenticity and belonging. And when it became clear that every path toward one thing led away from another, I’ve chosen the corner. Told myself that my clarity about the impossibility was somehow superior to everyone else’s messy attempts, where in the end it wasn’t, it was just quieter.

Anna faces an impossible equation. To live authentically and to follow her heart toward Vronsky she must destroy not just her marriage but her motherhood. Not just her reputation but her very ability to exist in society. The novel’s cruelest insight is that Anna’s mistake isn’t loving Vronsky. It’s believing that love could be enough. That you could solve the absurd rather than simply inhabit it.

She exchanges one form of incompleteness for another. The sterile respectability of life with Karenin for the fevered isolation of life with Vronsky. Neither allows her to be whole. When she realises there’s no configuration that works, no answer that satisfies, she stops trying.

And this surrender, rather than her adultery, is her true tragedy.

This extends beyond romantic love. Tolstoy shows us character after character struggling to bridge the gap between self and other. Between inner truth and outer expression. Karenin can’t access his own emotions except through bureaucratic formulations. Vronsky can’t understand Anna’s anguish because he’s never had to choose between love and social existence; as a man, he can have both. Even Kitty and Levin, the novel’s happiest couple, experience moments of profound disconnection.

But some characters accept this incompleteness as the condition of being human and continue engaging. Others demand resolution and, finding none, choose destruction.

The novel suggests that isolation isn’t a failure of love but its very condition. We can only love what is separate from us, yet love seeks to eliminate that separation. This paradox reaches its apotheosis in Anna’s final hours, when her need for Vronsky’s love becomes so consuming that it destroys the very thing it seeks to preserve.

Her jealousy isn’t mere possessiveness. It’s an epistemological crisis. She can’t know Vronsky’s inner life. She can’t be certain of his love. And this uncertainty becomes unbearable precisely because she has sacrificed everything else for it. She’s attacked the space around the question with such violence that when she finds no answer, she has no ground left to stand on. It’s a kind of mode collapse. I think about this whenever I see someone online who’s made skepticism their entire personality. Or when I catch myself doing it.

Yet Tolstoy doesn’t counsel resignation. The novel’s most luminous moments come when characters briefly transcend their isolation through acts of spontaneous compassion or understanding.

Levin’s day mowing with the peasants, where he loses himself in physical rhythm and communal labor.

Anna’s morphine-induced insight into the hatred she and Vronsky share, which paradoxically allows her a moment of clarity and pity.

Karenin’s forgiveness of Anna at what he believes is her deathbed, when artificial social emotions give way to genuine spiritual feeling.

These moments can’t last. Karenin returns to his emotional rigidity. Levin can’t remain among the peasants. Anna’s clarity dissolves into renewed torment. But their transience doesn’t negate their truth. They suggest that meaning exists not in permanent states but in the ongoing engagement. Not in answers but in the quality of our questioning.

The sculpting itself, not the sculpture, is what matters.

This is what the philosophers were trying to tell us, but Tolstoy gives it flesh. Gives it weight. Gives it the specific texture of a scythe cutting through wet grass at dawn.

This is why the novel’s ending feels both necessary and insufficient. Levin’s realisation that good exists despite his inability to rationally prove it mirrors the novel’s own method—an accumulation of lived experience that yields wisdom without dogma.

“But my life now, my whole life… has a positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”

The qualification is everything. Not that life has meaning, but that we have the power to put meaning into it. Moment by moment. Despite everything.

Levin hasn’t answered the question. He’s simply decided to keep asking it. To stay at the party despite knowing it’s all arbitrary.

Here’s where Tolstoy transcends the philosophers. He doesn’t offer us another meta-answer about how to live with absurdity. He offers us something else entirely: the company of others who are also struggling with the question.

The novel doesn’t tell us how to attack the space. It shows us that everyone is already doing it. Badly and beautifully. Failing and trying again.

Where Camus gives us the myth of Sisyphus, where Nietzsche gives us the Übermensch, where Kierkegaard gives us the leap of faith, Tolstoy gives us the messy, contradictory, irreducible experience of other human beings trying and failing to solve the same unsolvable equation we face.

Philosophy tells you what to think about the question. Tolstoy shows you that everyone else is asking it too. In their own broken, beautiful ways. The novel becomes a companion.

The train that kills Anna is heading somewhere. Toward the modern world where such total destruction for love seems almost quaint. Where we’ve learned to compartmentalise our passions, to manage our rebellions, to live with what William James called “the habit of our losses.”

Yet the questions Tolstoy raises remain urgent because they’re not historical but existential. How do we live when meaning and happiness diverge? How do we love when love itself is what isolates us? How do we maintain faith in goodness when goodness provides no protection from suffering?

These are the same questions those philosophers were circling. But Tolstoy gives them flesh and blood and railway tickets.

I’m not a philosopher. I’m also not an English major, although in another life I would have liked to be. Walking away from that beach conversation, I realised something about why I keep returning to this book.

It’s not the answers. There aren’t any.

It’s the company. The proof that everyone else is also stumbling through the same fog. Attacking the same marble. Dancing at the same arbitrary party. Sometimes happy, sometimes miserable, sometimes giving up, sometimes pushing again.

And maybe this knowledge—not that there’s an answer, not even that we should keep looking for one, but simply that we’re all in this impossible position together—maybe this is the only wisdom that matters. If philosophy teaches us that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, Anna Karenina shows us Sisyphus in all his particular human detail. Sometimes happy, sometimes miserable, sometimes giving up, sometimes pushing again. Always achingly, specifically human.

The horizon line remains erased. The fog keeps doing what fog does, but we’re all in it.