Confession
by Leo Tolstoy
VIII
All these doubts, which I am now able to express more or less
systematically, I could not then have expressed. I then only felt
that however logically inevitable were my conclusions concerning
the vanity of life, confirmed as they were by the greatest
thinkers, there was something not right about them. Whether it
was in the reasoning itself or in the statement of the question I
did not know — I only felt that the conclusion was rationally
convincing, but that that was insufficient. All these conclusions
could not so convince me as to make me do what followed from my
reasoning, that is to say, kill myself. And I should have told an
untruth had I, without killing myself, said that reason had
brought me to the point I had reached. Reason worked, but
something else was also working which I can only call a
consciousness of life. A force was working which compelled me to
turn my attention to this and not to that; and it was this force
which extricated me from my desperate situation and turned my
mind in quite another direction. This force compelled me to turn
my attention to the fact that I and a few hundred similar people
are not the whole of mankind, and that I did not yet know the
life of mankind.
Looking at the narrow circle of my equals, I saw only people
who had not understood the question, or who had understood it and
drowned it in life's intoxication, or had understood it and ended
their lives, or had understood it and yet from weakness were
living out their desperate life. And I saw no others. It seemed
to me that that narrow circle of rich, learned, and leisured
people to which I belonged formed the whole of humanity, and that
those milliards of others who have lived and are living were
cattle of some sort — not real people.
Strange, incredibly incomprehensible as it now seems to me
that I could, while reasoning about life, overlook the whole life
of mankind that surrounded me on all sides; that I could to such
a degree blunder so absurdly as to think that my life, and
Solomon's and Schopenhauer's, is the real, normal life, and that
the life of the milliards is a circumstance undeserving of
attention — strange as this now is to me, I see that so it was.
In the delusion of my pride of intellect it seemed to me so
indubitable that I and Solomon and Schopenhauer had stated the
question so truly and exactly that nothing else was possible —
so indubitable did it seem that all those milliards consisted of
men who had not yet arrived at an apprehension of all the
profundity of the question — that I sought for the meaning of my
life without it once occurring to me to ask: "But what
meaning is and has been given to their lives by all the milliards
of common folk who live and have lived in the world?"
I long lived in this state of lunacy, which, in fact if not in
words, is particularly characteristic of us very liberal and
learned people. But thanks either to the strange physical
affection I have for the real labouring people, which compelled
me to understand them and to see that they are not so stupid as
we suppose, or thanks to the sincerity of my conviction that I
could know nothing beyond the fact that the best I could do was
to hang myself, at any rate I instinctively felt that if I wished
to live and understand the meaning of life, I must seek this
meaning not among those who have lost it and wish to kill
themselves, but among those milliards of the past and the present
who make life and who support the burden of their own lives and
of ours also. And I considered the enormous masses of those
simple, unlearned, and poor people who have lived and are living
and I saw something quite different. I saw that, with rare
exceptions, all those milliards who have lived and are living do
not fit into my divisions, and that I could not class them as not
understanding the question, for they themselves state it and
reply to it with extraordinary clearness. Nor could I consider
them epicureans, for their life consists more of privations and
sufferings than of enjoyments. Still less could I consider them
as irrationally dragging on a meaningless existence, for every
act of their life, as well as death itself, is explained by them.
To kill themselves they consider the greatest evil. It appeared
that all mankind had a knowledge, unacknowledged and despised by
me, of the meaning of life. It appeared that reasonable knowledge
does not give the meaning of life, but excludes life: while the
meaning attributed to life by milliards of people, by all
humanity, rests on some despised pseudo-knowledge.
Rational knowledge presented by the learned and wise, denies
the meaning of life, but the enormous masses of men, the whole of
mankind receive that meaning in irrational knowledge. And that
irrational knowledge is faith, that very thing which I could not
but reject. It is God, One in Three; the creation in six days;
the devils and angels, and all the rest that I cannot accept as
long as I retain my reason.
My position was terrible. I knew I could find nothing along
the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life; and
there — in faith — was nothing but a denial of reason, which
was yet more impossible for me than a denial of life. From
rational knowledge it appeared that life is an evil, people know
this and it is in their power to end life; yet they lived and
still live, and I myself live, though I have long known that life
is senseless and an evil. By faith it appears that in order to
understand the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the
very thing for which alone a meaning is required.
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