Anna Karenina - Part 5

"Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast

revealed them unto babes." So Levin thought about his wife as he

talked to her that evening.

Levin thought of the text, not because he considered himself

"wise and prudent." He did not so consider himself, but he could

not help knowing that he had more intellect than his wife and

Agafea Mihalovna, and he could not help knowing that when he

thought of death, he thought with all the force of his intellect.

He knew too that the brains of many great men, whose thoughts he

had read, had brooded over death and yet knew not a hundredth

part of what his wife and Agafea Mihalovna knew about it.

Different as those two women were, Agafea Mihalovna and Katya, as

his brother Nikolay had called her, and as Levin particularly

liked to call her now, they were quite alike in this. Both knew,

without a shade of doubt, what sort of thing life was and what

was death, and though neither of them could have answered, and

would even not have understood the questions that presented

themselves to Levin, both had no doubt of the significance of

this event, and were precisely alike in their way of looking at

it, which they shared with millions of people. The proof that

they knew for a certainty the nature of death lay in the fact

that they knew without a second of hesitation how to deal with

the dying, and were not frightened of them. Levin and other men

like him, though they could have said a great deal about death,

obviously did not know this since they were afraid of death, and

were absolutely at a loss what to do when people were dying. If

Levin had been alone now with his brother Nikolay, he would have

looked at him with terror, and with still greater terror waited,

and would not have known what else to do.

More than that, he did not know what to say, how to look, how to

move. To talk of outside things seemed to him shocking,

impossible, to talk of death and depressing subjects--also

impossible. To be silent, also impossible. "If I look at him he

will think I am studying him, I am afraid; if I don't look at

him, he'll think I'm thinking of other things. If I walk on

tiptoe, he will be vexed; to tread firmly, I'm ashamed." Kitty

evidently did not think of herself, and had no time to think

about herself: she was thinking about him because she knew

something, and all went well. She told him about herself even

and about her wedding, and smiled and sympathized with him and

petted him, and talked of cases of recovery and all went well; so

then she must know. The proof that her behavior and Agafea

Mihalovna's was not instinctive, animal, irrational, was that

apart from the physical treatment, the relief of suffering, both

Agafea Mihalovna and Kitty required for the dying man something

else more important than the physical treatment, and something

which had nothing in common with physical conditions. Agafea

Mihalovna, speaking of the man just dead, had said: "Well, thank

God, he took the sacrament and received absolution; God grant

each one of us such a death." Katya in just the same way,

besides all her care about linen, bedsores, drink, found time the

very first day to persuade the sick man of the necessity of

taking the sacrament and receiving absolution.