It is not possible
that this condition of despair should be natural to mankind.' And
I sought for an explanation in all the branches of knowledge
acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and
with no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but
laboriously and obstinately for days and nights together. I
sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself--and I
found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who
before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also
found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized
that the very thing which was leading me to despair--the
meaningless absurdity of life--is the only incontestable
knowledge accessible to man."
To prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, and
Schopenhauer. And he finds only four ways in which men of his
own class and society are accustomed to meet the situation.
Either mere animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing
the dragon or the mice--"and from such a way," he says, "I can
learn nothing, after what I now know;" or reflective
epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts--which is
only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first; or
manly suicide; or seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and
plaintively clinging to the bush of life.
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