________________________________________________
_ 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 every one,
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 hirnself,
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." _
Read next: Part Eight: Chapter 13
Read previous: Part Eight: Chapter 11
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