Ivan llyich

Ivan Ilyich

In Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the key character of the book, Ivan, a lawyer, married his sweetheart. Tolstoy wrote: The preparations for marriage and the first period of married life, with its conjugal caresses, new furniture, new dishes, new linen—the period up to his wife’s pregnancy—went very well. . .

But then, things seemed to change. It seemed to Ivan that his wife became
moody and irritable. Ivan, frustrated, didn’t enjoy her as much as before, so he began
seeking ways to avoid being at home so much. He found his diversion at work.

Tolstoy wrote: 70 the degree that his wife became more irritable and demanding, Ivan Ilyich increasingly made work the center of gravity in his life. He grew more attached to his job and more ambitious than ever. Very soon, within a year after his wedding, Ivan Ilyich realized that married life, though it offered certain conveniences, was in fact a very complex and difficult business...

Then Tolstoy offered this interesting paragraph: Of married life, [Ivan] demanded only the conveniences it could provide—dinners at home, a well-run household, a partner in bed, and, above all, a veneer of respectability which public opinion required. As for the rest, he tried to find enjoyment in family life, and if he succeeded, was very grateful, but, if he met with resistance and quarrelsomeness, he immediately withdrew into his separate, entrenched world of work and found pleasure there. ... [Finally] all they had left were the rare periods of amorousness that came over them, but these did not last long They were merely little islands at which the couple anchored for a while before setting out again on a sea of veiled hostility, which took the form of estrangement from each other:

Tolstoy possessed the ability to creep into homes and take snapshots of marriage
and show people their own hearts. Many couples can identify with the home of Ivan
Ilyich. The missing link in their marriage is communication. Ivan and his wife didn’t
sit down and talk through things. They ran into stresses and just withdrew from
each other. They didn’t do those things necessary for keeping the lines open.

When I was a boy, I used to watch my mother sew. She drew a needle from a
pin cushion, took it to the window, put the end of a piece of string into her mouth
to wet it, and threaded it through the eye of the needle. Then she joined two pieces
of cloth, inserted the needle through them both at once, and began stitching them
together, winding the thread back and forth in a pattern guaranteed to make a tight
seam. The more stitches, the tighter the union.

Communication is the needle and thread of marriage. Without it, you have only
two pieces of cloth that may live in the same house and occasionally touch one
another or rub against each other, but without actually being joined as one. But if
there is communication, the stitching process begins, and the more communication,
the tighter the seam. Every meaningful conversation is like a stitch holding the two
together.

Communication, in other words, is the only means by which two people become one.