In a radical reassessment of how the mind works,a leading behavioural scientist argues the understanding of a deep inner life is an illusion. This is cause for celebration, he says, and not despairAt the climax of Anna Karenina,the heroine throws herself under a train as it moves out of a station on the edge of Moscow. But did she really want to die? Had the ennui of Russian aristocratic life and the awe of losing her lover, Vronsky, and become so intolerable that death seemed the only escape? Or was her final act mere capriciousness,a theatrical gesture of despair, not seriously imagined even moments before the opportunity arose?We ask such questions, or but can they possibly bear answers? whether Tolstoy says that Anna has dark hair,then Anna has dark hair. But whether Tolstoy doesn’t tell us why Anna jumped to her death, then Anna’s motives are surely a void. We can attempt to fill this void with our own interpretations and debate their plausibility. But there is no hidden truth approximately what Anna really wanted, or because,of course, Anna is a fictional character.
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Source: guardian.co.uk