A Confession - Leo Tolstoy (great novels TXT) 📗

a third time for pleasure. But this third time he saw another new sight: he saw men carrying something. “What is that?” “A dead man.” “What does dead mean?” asked the prince. He was told that to become dead means to become like that man. The prince approached the corpse, uncovered it, and looked at it. “What will happen to him now?” asked the prince. He was told that the corpse would be buried in the ground. “Why?” “Because he will certainly not return to life, and will only produce a stench and worms.” “And is that the fate of all men? Will the same thing happen to me? Will they bury me, and shall I cause a stench and be eaten by worms?” “Yes.” “Home! I shall not drive out for pleasure, and never will so drive out again!”

And Sakya Muni could find no consolation in life, and decided that life is the greatest of evils; and he devoted all the strength of his soul to free himself from it, and to free others; and to do this so that, even after death, life shall not be renewed any more but be completely destroyed at its very roots. So speaks all the wisdom of India.

These are the direct replies that human wisdom gives when it replies to life’s question.

“The life of the body is an evil and a lie. Therefore the destruction of the life of the body is a blessing, and we should desire it,” says Socrates.

“Life is that which should not be⁠—an evil; and the passage into Nothingness is the only good in life,” says Schopenhauer.

“All that is in the world⁠—folly and wisdom and riches and poverty and mirth and grief⁠—is vanity and emptiness. Man dies and nothing is left of him. And that is stupid,” says Solomon.

“To live in the consciousness of the inevitability of suffering, of becoming enfeebled, of old age and of death, is impossible⁠—we must free ourselves from life, from all possible life,” says Buddha.

And what these strong minds said has been said and thought and felt by millions upon millions of people like them. And I have thought it and felt it.

So my wandering among the sciences, far from freeing me from my despair, only strengthened it. One kind of knowledge did not reply to life’s question, the other kind replied directly confirming my despair, indicating not that the result at which I had arrived was the fruit of error or of a diseased state of my mind, but on the contrary that I had thought correctly, and that my thoughts coincided with the conclusions of the most powerful of human minds.

It is no good deceiving oneself. It is all⁠—vanity! Happy is he who has not been born: death is better than life, and one must free oneself from life.

VII

Not finding an explanation in science I began to seek for it in life, hoping to find it among the people around me. And I began to observe how the people around me⁠—people like myself⁠—lived, and what their attitude was to this question which had brought me to despair.

And this is what I found among people who were in the same position as myself as regards education and manner of life.

I found that for people of my circle there were four ways out of the terrible position in which we are all placed.

The first was that of ignorance. It consists in not knowing, not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity. People of this sort⁠—chiefly women, or very young or very dull people⁠—have not yet understood that question of life which presented itself to Schopenhauer, Solomon, and Buddha. They see neither the dragon that awaits them nor the mice gnawing the shrub by which they are hanging, and they lick the drops of honey, but they lick those drops of honey only for a while: something will turn their attention to the dragon and the mice, and there will be an end to their licking. From them I had nothing to learn⁠—one cannot cease to know what one does know.

The second way out is epicureanism. It consists, while knowing the hopelessness of life, in making use meanwhile of the advantages one has, disregarding the dragon and the mice, and licking the honey in the best way, especially if there is much of it within reach. Solomon expresses this way out thus: “Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: and that this should accompany him in his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun.

“Therefore eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine with a merry heart.⁠ ⁠… Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity⁠ ⁠… for this is thy portion in life and in thy labours which thou takest under the sun.⁠ ⁠… Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is not work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

That is the way in which the majority of people of our circle make life possible for themselves. Their circumstances furnish them with more of welfare than of hardship, and their moral dullness makes it possible for them to forget that the advantage of their position is accidental, and that not everyone can have a thousand wives and palaces like Solomon, that for everyone who has a thousand wives there are a thousand without a wife, and that for each palace there are a thousand people who have to build it in the sweat of their brows; and that the accident that has today made me a Solomon may tomorrow make me a Solomon’s slave. The dullness of these people’s imagination enables them to forget the things that gave Buddha no peace⁠—the inevitability of sickness, old age, and death, which today or tomorrow will destroy