It was cold and clear. Above the dirty, semi-dark streets, above the black roofs, stood the dark, starry sky. Only looking at the sky did Pierre not feel the baseness of everything earthly compared with the height his soul had risen to. At the entrance to Arbat Square, the huge expanse of the dark, starry night opened out to Pierre's eyes. Almost in the middle of that sky, over Prechistensky Boulevard, stood the high, bright comet of the year 1812--surrounded, strewn with stars on all sides, but different from them in its closeness to the earth, its white light and long, raised tail--that same comet which presaged, as they said, all sorts of horrors and the end of the world. But for Pierre this bright star with its long, luminous tail did not arouse any frightening feeling. On the contrary, Pierre, his eyes wet with tears, gazed joyfully at this bright star, which, having flown with inexpressible speed through immeasurable space on its parabolic course, suddenly, like an arrow piercing the earth, seemed to have struck here its one chosen spot in the black sky and stopped, its tail raised energetically, its white light shining and playing among the countless other shimmering stars. It seemed to Pierre that this star answered fully to what was in his softened and encouraged soul, now blossoming into new life.

* * *

This is the passage that ends volume 2 of War and Peace. After this will come another clash with Napoleon, the violent death of many of the characters, the near-starvation of many others. But first Tolstoy offers me this moment of silence and wonder . . . a pause . . . a mystery . . . an observer's forthright joy in the face of a complex, unknowable universe.

This passage seems to me to be one of the most beautiful paragraphs ever written--despite the repetitions, because of the repetitions, I don't even know. Entering it is like entering a house. I step into the hallways of its sentences, lean out the windows of its quiet. 

The writer is long dead, the characters will die, the comet will disappear, the frosts will melt, and I also will be gone. But as I sit here, rereading this passage, I cannot believe in death.