Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy
Chapter 236
1414 words | Chapter 236
Levin strode along the highroad, absorbed not so much in his thoughts
(he could not yet disentangle them) as in his spiritual condition,
unlike anything he had experienced before.
The words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul like an electric
shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a single whole the
whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts that incessantly
occupied his mind. These thoughts had unconsciously been in his mind
even when he was talking about the land.
He was aware of something new in his soul, and joyfully tested this new
thing, not yet knowing what it was.
“Not living for his own wants, but for God? For what God? And could one
say anything more senseless than what he said? He said that one must
not live for one’s own wants, that is, that one must not live for what
we understand, what we are attracted by, what we desire, but must live
for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can understand nor
even define. What of it? Didn’t I understand those senseless words of
Fyodor’s? And understanding them, did I doubt of their truth? Did I
think them stupid, obscure, inexact? No, I understood him, and exactly
as he understands the words. I understood them more fully and clearly
than I understand anything in life, and never in my life have I doubted
nor can I doubt about it. And not only I, but everyone, the whole world
understands nothing fully but this, and about this only they have no
doubt and are always agreed.
“And I looked out for miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle
which would convince me. A material miracle would have persuaded me.
And here is a miracle, the sole miracle possible, continually existing,
surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it!
“Fyodor says that Kirillov lives for his belly. That’s comprehensible
and rational. All of us as rational beings can’t do anything else but
live for our belly. And all of a sudden the same Fyodor says that one
mustn’t live for one’s belly, but must live for truth, for God, and at
a hint I understand him! And I and millions of men, men who lived ages
ago and men living now—peasants, the poor in spirit and the learned,
who have thought and written about it, in their obscure words saying
the same thing—we are all agreed about this one thing: what we must
live for and what is good. I and all men have only one firm,
incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained
by the reason—it is outside it, and has no causes and can have no
effects.
“If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a
reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of
cause and effect.
“And yet I know it, and we all know it.
“What could be a greater miracle than that?
“Can I have found the solution of it all? can my sufferings be over?”
thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticing the heat nor
his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief from prolonged
suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it seemed to him
incredible. He was breathless with emotion and incapable of going
farther; he turned off the road into the forest and lay down in the
shade of an aspen on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his hot head
and lay propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery, woodland grass.
“Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand,” he thought,
looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and following the
movements of a green beetle, advancing along a blade of couch-grass and
lifting up in its progress a leaf of goat-weed. “What have I
discovered?” he asked himself, bending aside the leaf of goat-weed out
of the beetle’s way and twisting another blade of grass above for the
beetle to cross over onto it. “What is it makes me glad? What have I
discovered?
“I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I
understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives
me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.
“Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this grass
and of this beetle (there, she didn’t care for the grass, she’s opened
her wings and flown away), there was going on a transformation of
matter in accordance with physical, chemical, and physiological laws.
And in all of us, as well as in the aspens and the clouds and the misty
patches, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from what? into
what?—Eternal evolution and struggle.... As though there could be any
sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished that
in spite of the utmost effort of thought along that road I could not
discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and yearnings.
Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: ‘To live for God, for my
soul.’ And this meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mysterious and
marvelous. Such, indeed, is the meaning of everything existing. Yes,
pride,” he said to himself, turning over on his stomach and beginning
to tie a noose of blades of grass, trying not to break them.
“And not merely pride of intellect, but dulness of intellect. And most
of all, the deceitfulness; yes, the deceitfulness of intellect. The
cheating knavishness of intellect, that’s it,” he said to himself.
And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas
during the last two years, the beginning of which was the clear
confronting of death at the sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill.
Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and himself too,
there was nothing in store but suffering, death, and forgetfulness, he
had made up his mind that life was impossible like that, and that he
must either interpret life so that it would not present itself to him
as the evil jest of some devil, or shoot himself.
But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and
feeling, and had even at that very time married, and had had many joys
and had been happy, when he was not thinking of the meaning of his
life.
What did this mean? It meant that he had been living rightly, but
thinking wrongly.
He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that
he had sucked in with his mother’s milk, but he had thought, not merely
without recognition of these truths, but studiously ignoring them.
Now it was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of the
beliefs in which he had been brought up.
“What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had
not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and
not for my own desires? I should have robbed and lied and killed.
Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed
for me.” And with the utmost stretch of imagination he could not
conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself, if he had not
known what he was living for.
“I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not give an
answer to my question—it is incommensurable with my question. The
answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is
right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at in any
way, it was given to me as to all men, _given_, because I could not
have got it from anywhere.
“Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived at knowing
that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that in my
childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already
in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the
struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who
hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of
reason. But loving one’s neighbor reason could never discover, because
it’s irrational.”
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