Anna Karenina - Part 8

"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.