Anna Karenina - Part 8

"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."