I accept all blame and pick up the gauntlet of your challenge with a further, gentle push to tip you over the edge:
The carriage and horses had long been led out on the other side and hitched up, and the sun had already half disappeared, and the evening frost had covered the pools by the crossing with stars, but Pierre and Andrei, to the astonishment of the lackeys, coachmen, and ferrymen, were still standing on the ferry and talking.
“If there is God and if there is a future life, then there is truth, there is virtue; and man’s highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, we must believe,” said Pierre, “that we do not live only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and will live eternally there, in the all” (he pointed to the sky). Prince Andrei stood with his elbow resting on the rail of the ferry, and, listening to Pierre, did not take his eyes off the red gleam of the sun on the blue floodwaters. Pierre fell silent. It was completely still. The ferry had long been moored, and only the waves of the current lapped with a faint sound against the ferry’s bottom. It seemed to Prince Andrei that this splash of waves made a refrain to Pierre’s words, saying: “It’s true, I believe it.”
Prince Andrei sighed, and with a luminous, childlike, tender gaze looked into the flushed, rapturous face of Pierre, who still felt timid before his superior friend.
“Yes, if only it were so!” he said. “Anyhow, let’s go and get in,” Prince Andrei added, and, stepping off the ferry, he looked at the sky Pierre had pointed to, and for the first time since Austerlitz saw that high, eternal sky he had seen as he lay on the battlefield, and something long asleep, something that was best in him, suddenly awakened, joyful and young in his soul. This feeling disappeared as soon as Prince Andrei re-entered the habitual conditions of life, but he knew that this feeling, which he did not know how to develop, lived in him. The meeting with Pierre marked an epoch for Prince Andrei, from which began what, while outwardly the same, was in his inner world a new life.
(War & Peace, Volume Two, Part II, xii, p.389)
Thus Tolstoy invented the Joycean epiphany, and the post-classical modern bromance. (Let me know when you start reading…)
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