A Confession by Leo Tolstoy - Chapter 8

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter eight of a confession by Leo Tolstoy, translated by
Almer Maud. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.
All these doubts, which I am now able to express
more or less systematically, I could not have then expressed.
I then only felt that, however logically inevitable were my
conclusions concerning the vanity of life, confirmed as they were

(00:20):
by the greatest thinkers, there was something not right about them.
Whether it was 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 it was insufficient.
All these conclusions could not so convince me as to
make me do what followed for my reasoning, that is
to say, kill myself. And I should have told an untruth,

(00:40):
had I, without killing myself, said that reason had brought
me to the point that 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

(01:01):
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 for living out their desperate life, and

(01:23):
I saw no others. It seemed to me that the
narrow circle of rich, learned and leisured people to which
I belonged formed the whole of humanity, and that those
millards of others who have lived in our 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

(01:44):
surrounded me on all sides, that I could, to such
a degree blunder so absolutely as to think that my life,
in Solomon's and Schopenhauer's is the real normal life, and
that the life of the millards is a circumstance undeserving
of attention. Strange as it is now to me, I
see that so it was in the delusion of my
pride and of intellect. It seemed to me so indubitable
that I, in Solomon and Schopenhauer, had stated the question

(02:07):
so truly and exactly that nothing else was possible. So
indubitable did it seem that all those millards consisted of
men who had not yet arrived in an apprehension of
all the profundity of the question that I sought for
the meaning of my life, without at once occurring me
to ask, but what meaning is and has been given
to their lives by all the millards of common folk
who live and have lived in the world. I long

(02:29):
lived in this state of lunacy, which, in fact, if
not in words, is particularly characteristic of us very liberal
and worded people. But thanks either to the strange physical
affection I have for the real laboring 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

(02:49):
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
those millards 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 in

(03:10):
our living, and I saw something quite different. I saw that,
with rare exceptions, all those millards who have lived in
our living do not fit any of my divisions. That
I could not class them as not understanding the question,
for they themselves stated and replied to it with extraordinary clearness.
Nor could I consider them epicureans, for their life consists
of more privations and sufferings than of enjoyments. Still less

(03:32):
could I consider them as irrationally dragging on a meaningless existence,
for every act of their life, as well as death,
is explained by them. To kill themselves they considered 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

(03:53):
life by millards of people, by all humanity, rests on
some despised pseudo knowledge. Rational knowledge centered by the learned
and wise, denies the meaning of life. But the enormous
masses of men, the whole of mankind, received that meaning
and irrational knowledge. And that irrational knowledge is faith. That
very thing which I cannot but reject it is God

(04:14):
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 that I could find nothing among the path
of reasonable knowledge accept 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.

(04:37):
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 and 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. End of Chapter eight,