Sea Song

Every Breaking Wave

(Best if read while listening to the 2nd track on U2's Songs of Innocence - still free on iTunes)

Levin had been married for three months. He was happy, but not at all in the way he had expected.

Every breaking wave on the shore
Tells the next one there'll be one more

At every step he felt like a man who, after having admired a little boat going smoothly and happily on a lake, then got into this boat. He saw that it was not enough to sit straight without rocking; he also had to keep in mind, not forgetting for a minute, where he was going, that there was water underneath, that he had to row and his unaccustomed hands hurt, that it was easy only to look at, but doing it, while very joyful, was also very difficult.

If you go your way and I go mine
Are we so helpless against the tide?
Baby, every dog on the street
Knows that we're in love with defeat
Are we ready to be swept off our feet
And stop chasing every breaking wave?

As a bachelor, seeing the married life of others, their trifling, cares, quarrels, jealousy, he used only to smile scornfully to himself. In his own future married life, he was convinced, there not only could be nothing like that, but even all its external forms, it seemed to him were bound to be in every way completely unlike other people's lives.

Every sailor knows that the sea
Is a friend made enemy
Every shipwrecked soul knows what it is
To live without intimacy

And suddenly...his life with his wife did not form itself in any special way, but was, on the contrary, formed entirely of those insignificant trifles he had scorned so much before, but which now, against his will acquired an extraordinary and irrefutable significance.

I thought I heard the captain's voice
But it's hard to listen while you preach

Levin never imagined  that there could be any other relations between himself and his wife than tender, respectful, loving ones, and suddenly, in the first days, they quarrelled, and she told him he did not love her, loved only himself, wept and waved her hands.

If you go your way and I go mine
Are we so helpless against the tide?
Baby, every dog on the street
Knows that we're in love with defeat
Are we ready to be swept off our feet
And stop chasing every breaking wave?

He understood clearly for the first time what he had not understood when he had led her out of the church after the wedding. He understood not only that she was close to him, but that he no longer knew where she ended and he began.

You know where my heart is
The same place that yours has been
We know that we fear to win
And so we end before we begin

Notes: Book quotations taken from Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Italicized quotes from U2's Every Breaking Wave.