A CONFESSION [5]
but I felt I was not quite sound mentally and that matters could
not long continue in that way. And I should perhaps then have come
to the state of despair I reached fifteen years later had there not
been one side of life still unexplored by me which promised me
happiness: that was my marriage.
For a year I busied myself with arbitration work, the schools,
and the magazine; and I became so worn out -- as a result
especially of my mental confusion -- and so hard was my struggle as
Arbiter, so obscure the results of my activity in the schools, so
repulsive my shuffling in the magazine (which always amounted to
one and the same thing: a desire to teach everybody and to hide
the fact that I did not know what to teach), that I fell ill,
mentally rather than physically, threw up everything, and went away
to the Bashkirs in the steppes, to breathe fresh air, drink kumys
[Footnote: A fermented drink prepared from mare's milk.--A. M.],
and live a merely animal life.
Returning from there I married. The new conditions of happy
family life completely diverted me from all search for the general
meaning of life. My whole life was centred at that time in my
family, wife and children, and therefore in care to increase our
means of livelihood. My striving after self-perfection, for which
I had already substituted a striving for perfection in general,
i.e. progress, was now again replaced by the effort simply to
secure the best possible conditions for myself and my family.
So another fifteen years passed.
In spite of the fact that I now regarded authorship as of no
importance -- the temptation of immense monetary rewards and
applause for my insignificant work -- and I devoted myself to it as
a means of improving my material position and of stifling in my
soul all questions as to the meaning of my own life or life in
general.
I wrote: teaching what was for me the only truth, namely,
that one should live so as to have the best for oneself and one's
family.
So I lived; but five years ago something very strange began to
happen to me. At first I experienced moments of perplexity and
arrest of life, and though I did not know what to do or how to
live; and I felt lost and became dejected. But this passed and I
went on living as before. Then these moments of perplexity began
to recur oftener and oftener, and always in the same form. They
were always expressed by the questions: What is it for? What does
it lead to?
At first it seemed to me that these were aimless and
irrelevant questions. I thought that it was all well known, and
that if I should ever wish to deal with the solution it would not
cost me much effort; just at present I had no time for it, but when
I wanted to I should be able to find the answer. The questions
however began to repeat themselves frequently, and to demand
replies more and more insistently; and like drops of ink always
falling on one place they ran together into one black blot.
Then occurred what happens to everyone sickening with a mortal
internal disease. At first trivial signs of indisposition appear
to which the sick man pays no attention; then these signs reappear
more and more often and merge into one uninterrupted period of
suffering. The suffering increases, and before the sick man can
look round, what he took for a mere indisposition has already
become more important to him than anything else in the world -- it
is death!
That is what happened to me. I understood that it was no
casual indisposition but something very important, and that if
these questions constantly repeated themselves they would have to
be answered. And I tried to answer them. The questions seemed
such stupid, simple, childish ones; but as soon as I touched them
and tried to solve them I at once became convinced, first, that
they are not childish and stupid but the most important and
profound of life's questions; and secondly that, occupying myself
with my Samara estate, the education of my