A half dozen pages to go and I'll be through Anna Karenina. A few weeks back I suddenly realized that I haven't read any Tolstoy, so I picked this one up, along with War and Peace. (These thick ones may throw a wrench into my book-a-week plan for 2007, but we'll see how it goes.)
Don't get me wrong. I've enjoyed the book--the writing is beautiful--but it hasn't gripped me. Not like I thought it would. And then... Part Eight, Chapter 13, page 918. Pay dirt. Check it out yourself below the fold.
And Levin remembered a recent scene between Dolly and her children. Left by themselves, the children began cooking raspberries over a candle and pouring jets of milk into their mouths. Their mother, catching them red-handed, tried in Levin's presence to make them realize how much the labor that they were wasting had cost grown-up people, that all that trouble had been taken for them, and that if they broke the cups they would have nothing to drink out of and that if they spilled the milk they would have nothing to eat and would die of starvation.
Levin was struck by the calm, cheerless distrust with which the children listened to their mother's words. They were only distressed that their amusing game had been brought to an end, and they did not believe a single word their mother was saying. They could not, in fact, believe her because they could not imagine the vast quantities of the things they enjoyed and therefore could not imagine that what they were destroying was the very thing they lived by.
"That is all very well," they thought, "and there is nothing interesting or important about it, because those things have always been and always will be. It's the same thing all over and over again. There is no need for us to worry about it; it's all ready for us. What we want is to think of something new, something of our own. So we thought of putting raspberries in a cup and cooking them over a candle and of pouring milk straight into each other's mouths like fountains. This is jolly and new and not in any way worse than drinking out of cups."
"Don't we, and don't I, do just the same when we are trying to find the significance of the forces of nature and the meaning of man's life by reason?" he went on thinking.
"And don't all the philosophic theories do the same when by the way of thought, which is strange and unnatural to man, they bring him to a knowledge of what he has known long ago and indeed known so well that he could not have lived without it? Is it not abundantly clear in the development of every philosopher's theory that he knows in advance, as incontestably as the peasant Fyodor and no whit more clearly than he, the chief meaning of life and is merely trying by a doubtful intellectual process to come back to what everyone knows?
"Just try and let the children get things for themselves, make the cups, milk the cows, and so on. Would they have been naughty in that case? They would have starved to death. Just try and let us loose with our passions, our thoughts, and without any idea of the one God and Creator. Or without any idea of what is good and without any explanation of moral evil.
"Just try and build up anything without these conceptions!
"We destroy only because we have had our fill spiritually. Yes, indeed, we are children!
"Where do I get the joyful knowledge I have in common with the peasant and that alone gives me peace of mind? Where did I get it?
"I, who have been brought up in the conception of God as a Christian, whose life has been filled with the spiritual blessings which Christianity gave me, brimful of these blessings and living by them, I, like a child, not understanding them, am destroying, or rather want to destroy that by which I live. But as soon as an important moment in life comes, like children when they are cold and hungry, I go to Him, and even less than the children, whose mother scolds them for their childish pranks, I feel that my childish attempts at being mischievous because I have plenty of everything are not reckoned against me.
"Yes, what I know, I know not by reason, but because it has been given to me, revealed to me, and I know it in my heart and believe in the chief things the church proclaims.
"The church? The church!" repeated Levin and, rolling over on his other side and leaning on his elbow, he began looking at a herd of cattle in the distance going down to the river on the other side.
“But can I believe in everything the church proclaims?" he thought, testing himself and trying to think of anything that might destroy his present peace of mind. He purposely thought of those doctrines of the church which always seemed most strange to him and led him into temptation. "The creation? But how did I explain existence? By existence? By nothing? The devil and sin? But how do I explain evil? The Redeemer?...
"But I know nothing, nothing at all, and I can know nothing but what I am told together with the rest."
And it seemed to him now that there was not a single dogma of the church which could destroy the principal thing--belief in God and in goodness the only goal of man's existence.
For each of the dogmas of the church one could substitute the belief in serving truth and justice rather than one's personal needs. And each of these dogmas not only did not destroy that belief, but was necessary for the fulfillment of the greatest miracle continually recurring on earth, the miracle that made it possible for everyone together with millions of other most diverse human beings, sages and simpletons, children and old men, peasants, Lvov, Kitty, beggars and kings, to understand with complete certainty one and the same thing and live the life of the spirit, the only life that is worth living and the only life that we prize.
Lying on his back, he was now gazing at the high, cloudless sky. "Don't I know that that is infinite space and not a rounded vault? But however much I may screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot see it except as round and finite, and though I know that space is infinite, I am absolutely right when I see a firm blue vault, far more right than when I strain to see beyond it."
Levin ceased thinking and only seemed to listen to mysterious voices talking joyfully and anxiously to each other about something.
"Can this be faith?" he thought, afraid to believe in his good fortune. "Lord, I thank you!" he murmured, gulping down the rising sobs and with both hands wiping away the tears that filled his eyes.
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