Finding Freedom in Letting Go — War and Peace

Pierre does not feel captivity's full cost until after liberation. He reaches Orel, prepares to leave, then falls ill for three months with bilious fever while doctors bleed and dose him. Rescue to illness stays a gray blur: Petya's body, news of Andrew's death and Helene's, officers' questions, trouble finding horses. During convalescence he slowly regains warmth, bed, and meals without orders. Dreams still place him in captivity while deaths become real. Joyous freedom returns, stronger than at the first halt outside Moscow, because no one demands anything and Helene's torment is gone. The aim-of-life question that haunted him disappears; absence of aim becomes happiness. He finds faith not in rules but in an ever-living God everywhere, learned from Karataev: what he sought at a distance was at his feet. He throws away the mental telescope that made distant worldliness look infinite and sees the great in ordinary life; What for? answers itself: because God wills even a hair to fall.