Audio recording of a lecture given by Dean Sarah Davis on August 29, 2025 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: St. John’s students often have the experience of coming to beautiful realizations and insights that seem to push past the ordinary—to touch that which is most important about life, about being human, about the world. But so too do we know what it feels like to plummet back to the ground, to confusion and questioning. The lives of two principal and beloved characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Pierre and Andrei, are marked by this kind of movement, being drawn in, or up, or beyond, only to find themselves seemingly back at the beginning, lost again. This lecture explores the pattern in these characters—a kind of blooming and wilting and re-blooming—and suggests that, rather than revealing an absurdity in the truth-seeking character of human beings, these rises and falls point to our most potent possibility.