A Confession

by Leo Tolstoy

I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I.

I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.

It was plain to me that art is an adornment of life, an allurement to life. But life had lost its attraction for me, so how could I attract others?

"What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?"

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

For him that is among the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.

By faith it appears that in order to understand the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which alone a meaning is required.

I asked myself what my life is, and got the reply: An evil and an absurdity. and really my life - a life of indulgence of desires - was senseless and evil, and therefore the reply, "Life is evil and an absurdity", referred only to my life, but not to human life in general.

Furthermore I said to myself, the essence of every faith consists in its giving life a meaning which death does not destroy.

The Church as an assembly of true believers united by love and therefore possessed of true knowledge became the basis of my belief. I told myself that divine truth cannot be accessible to a separate individual; it is revealed only to the whole assembly of people united by love. To attain truth one must not separate, and in order not to separate one must love and must endure things one may not agree with.

I do not so much look round as experience with my whole body the point of support on which I am held. I see that I no longer hang as if about to fall, but am firmly held. I ask myself how I am held: I feel about, look round, and see that under me, under the middle of my body, there is one support, and that when I look upwards I lie on it in the position of securest balance, and that it alone gave me support before.

I was glad and tranquil. And it seemed as if someone said to me: "See that you remember." And I awoke.