Anna Karenina
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.”
Chapter 13
And Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed between Dolly and
her children. The children, left to themselves, had begun cooking
raspberries over the candles and squirting milk into each other’s
mouths with a syringe. Their mother, catching them at these pranks,
began reminding them in Levin’s presence of the trouble their mischief
gave to the grown-up people, and that this trouble was all for their
sake, and that if they smashed the cups they would have nothing to
drink their tea out of, and that if they wasted the milk, they would
have nothing to eat, and die of hunger.
And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with which
the children heard what their mother said to them. They were simply
annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did not
believe a word of what their mother was saying. They could not believe
it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all they
habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were
destroying was the very thing they lived by.
“That all comes of itself,” they thought, “and there’s nothing
interesting or important about it because it has always been so, and
always will be so. And it’s all always the same. We’ve no need to think
about that, it’s all ready. But we want to invent something of our own,
and new. So we thought of putting raspberries in a cup, and cooking
them over a candle, and squirting milk straight into each other’s
mouths. That’s fun, and something new, and not a bit worse than
drinking out of cups.”
“Isn’t it just the same that we do, that I did, searching by the aid of
reason for the significance of the forces of nature and the meaning of
the life of man?” he thought.
“And don’t all the theories of philosophy do the same, trying by the
path of thought, which is strange and not natural to man, to bring him
to a knowledge of what he has known long ago, and knows so certainly
that he could not live at all without it? Isn’t it distinctly to be
seen in the development of each philosopher’s theory, that he knows
what is the chief significance of life beforehand, just as positively
as the peasant Fyodor, and not a bit more clearly than he, and is
simply trying by a dubious intellectual path to come back to what
everyone knows?
“Now then, leave the children to themselves to get things alone and
make their crockery, get the milk from the cows, and so on. Would they
be naughty then? Why, they’d die of hunger! Well, then, leave us with
our passions and thoughts, without any idea of the one God, of the
Creator, or without any idea of what is right, without any idea of
moral evil.
“Just try and build up anything without those ideas!
“We only try to destroy them, because we’re spiritually provided for.
Exactly like the children!
“Whence have I that joyful knowledge, shared with the peasant, that
alone gives peace to my soul? Whence did I get it?
“Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life filled with
the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me, full of them, and
living on those blessings, like the children I did not understand them,
and destroy, that is try to destroy, what I live by. And as soon as an
important moment of life comes, like the children when they are cold
and hungry, I turn to Him, and even less than the children when their
mother scolds them for their childish mischief, do I feel that my
childish efforts at wanton madness are reckoned against me.
“Yes, what I know, I know not by reason, but it has been given to me,
revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by faith in the chief
thing taught by the church.
“The church! the church!” Levin repeated to himself. He turned over on
the other side, and leaning on his elbow, fell to gazing into the
distance at a herd of cattle crossing over to the river.
“But can I believe in all the church teaches?” he thought, trying
himself, and thinking of everything that could destroy his present
peace of mind. Intentionally he recalled all those doctrines of the
church which had always seemed most strange and had always been a
stumbling block to him.
“The Creation? But how did I explain existence? By existence? By
nothing? The devil and sin. But how do I explain evil?... The
atonement?...
“But I know nothing, nothing, and I can know nothing but what has been
told to me and all men.”
And it seemed to him that there was not a single article of faith of
the church which could destroy the chief thing—faith in God, in
goodness, as the one goal of man’s destiny.
Under every article of faith of the church could be put the faith in
the service of truth instead of one’s desires. And each doctrine did
not simply leave that faith unshaken, each doctrine seemed essential to
complete that great miracle, continually manifest upon earth, that made
it possible for each man and millions of different sorts of men, wise
men and imbeciles, old men and children—all men, peasants, Lvov, Kitty,
beggars and kings to understand perfectly the same one thing, and to
build up thereby that life of the soul which alone is worth living, and
which alone is precious to us.
Lying on his back, he gazed up now into the high, cloudless sky. “Do I
not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a round arch?
But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot see it
not round and not bounded, and in spite of my knowing about infinite
space, I am incontestably right when I see a solid blue dome, and more
right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it.”
Levin ceased thinking, and only, as it were, listened to mysterious
voices that seemed talking joyfully and earnestly within him.
“Can this be faith?” he thought, afraid to believe in his happiness.
“My God, I thank Thee!” he said, gulping down his sobs, and with both
hands brushing away the tears that filled his eyes.
Chapter 14