A Confession

by Leo Tolstoy

one that adhered closely to Christ’s central message of love and compassion for all, and nonresistance to aggression and evil.

And very soon this effort again changed into a desire to be stronger than others: to be more famous, more important and richer than others.

When I saw the head part from the body, and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed;

I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it; yet still hoped something of it.

I could keep up with the peasants at mowing,

See mowing scene in anna karenina.

“Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”

So I wandered in that wood of human knowledge, amid the gleams of mathematical and experimental science which showed me clear horizons but in a direction where there could be no home,

You are an accidentally united little lump of something.

all was vanity and vexation of spirit,

Solomon Laments.

They see neither the dragon that awaits them nor the mice gnawing the shrub

the accident that has today made me a Solomon may tomorrow make me a Solomon’s slave.

the escape of weakness,

were there no life, my reason would not exist; therefore reason is life’s son.

Ignorance always says just what I am saying. When it does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid.

By faith it appears that in order to understand the meaning of life I must repudiate my reason,

It was something like what happens in mathematics, when, thinking to solve an equation, we find we are working on an identity.

Where there is life there, since man began, faith has made life possible for him, and the chief outline of that faith is everywhere and always identical.

faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives.

What am I?—A part of the infinite. In those few words lies the whole problem.

since man began the relation of the finite to the infinite has been sought out and expressed.

hidden infinity of human thought,

“Why should that handle be moved? Isn’t it stupid!”

the assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth, is the most cruel thing one man can say to another;

truth lay in union by love,

killing is an evil repugnant to the first principles of any faith.

And I took note of all that is done by men who profess Christianity, and I was horrified.