Yes, indeed, there is more pain in life than gladness--it is one
long agony until the grave. Think how gay it makes me to
remember that this horrible misery of mine, coupled with this
unspeakable fear, may last fifty, one hundred, who knows how many
more years!"[78]
[78] Roubinovitch et Toulouse: La Melancolie, 1897, p. 170,
abridged.
This letter shows two things. First, you see how the entire
consciousness of the poor man is so choked with the feeling of
evil that the sense of there being any good in the world is lost
for him altogether. His attention excludes it, cannot admit it:
the sun has left his heaven. And secondly you see how the
querulous temper of his misery keeps his mind from taking a
religious direction. Querulousness of mind tends in fact rather
towards irreligion; and it has played, so far as I know, no part
whatever in the construction of religious systems.
Religious melancholy must be cast in a more melting mood.
Tolstoy has left us, in his book called My Confession, a
wonderful account of the attack of melancholy which led him to
his own religious conclusions.
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