War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [601]
“But maybe it’s my shirt on the table,” thought Prince Andrei, “and these are my legs, and that’s the door, but why is everything stretching and thrusting out and piti-piti-piti and ti-ti—and piti-piti-piti…Enough, stop, please, let me be,” Prince Andrei begged someone painfully. And suddenly his thought and feeling emerged again with extraordinary clarity and force.
“Yes, love” (he thought again with perfect clarity), “but not the love that loves for something, for some purpose, or for some reason, but the love I experienced for the first time when, as I lay dying, I saw my enemy and loved him all the same. I experienced the feeling of love, which is the very essence of the soul and which needs no object. Now, too, I am experiencing that blissful feeling. To love my neighbors, to love my enemies. To love everything—to love God in all His manifestations. You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. That’s why I experienced such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What’s become of him? Is he alive…Loving with a human love, one can pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, nothing can destroy it. It is the essence of the soul. But I’ve hated so many people in my life. And of all people, I have loved and hated no one so much as her.” And he vividly pictured Natasha to himself, not as he had pictured her before, with her loveliness alone, which brought him joy; but for the first time he pictured her soul. And he understood her feeling, her suffering, shame, repentance. For the first time now he understood all the cruelty of his refusal, saw the cruelty of his break with her. “If it were possible to see her just one more time. One time, looking into those eyes, to say…”
And piti-piti-piti and ti-ti, and piti-piti—boom, the fly struck. And his attention suddenly raced on to another world of reality and delirium, in which something special was happening. In that world, the edifice was still being raised without collapsing, something was still stretching, there was the same circle of red light around the candle, the same shirt-sphinx was lying by the door; but, besides all that, something creaked, there was a breath of fresh air, and a new white sphinx appeared, standing before the door. And the head of this sphinx had the pale face and shining eyes of that same Natasha, of whom he had just been thinking.
“Oh, how painful this constant delirium is!” thought Prince Andrei, trying to drive that face from his imagination. But that face stood before him with the force of reality, and that face was coming nearer. Prince Andrei wanted to return to the former world of pure thought, but he could not, and delirium was drawing him into its realm. The quiet, whispering voice continued its measured prattle, something weighed on him, stretched, and the strange face stood before him. Prince Andrei gathered all his forces so as to keep his senses; he stirred and suddenly there was a ringing in his ears, his eyes clouded, and, like a man plunging into water, he lost consciousness. When he came to himself, Natasha, that same living Natasha whom of all people in the world he most wanted to love with that new, pure, divine love which had now been revealed to him, was kneeling beside him. He understood that this was the living, real Natasha, and was not surprised, but quietly glad. Natasha, kneeling, gazed at him fearfully but fixedly (she was unable to move), trying to stifle her sobs. Her face was pale and motionless. Only in the lower part of it something trembled.
Prince Andrei sighed with relief, smiled, and held out his hand.
“You?” he said. “What happiness!”
With a quick but careful movement, Natasha moved closer to him on her knees and, carefully taking his hand, bent her head over it and began to kiss it, barely touching it with her