War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [718]
He could have no purpose, because he now had faith—not faith in some rules, or words, or thoughts, but faith in a living, ever-sensed God. Before he had sought for Him in the purposes he set for himself. This seeking for a purpose had only been a seeking for God; and suddenly he had learned in his captivity, not through words, not through arguments, but through immediate sensation, what his nanny had told him long ago: that God is here, right here, everywhere. In captivity he had learned that God in Karataev was much greater, more infinite and unfathomable, than in the Arkhitekton of the universe recognized by the Masons. He experienced the feeling of a man who has found what he was seeking under his own feet, while he had been straining his eyes looking far away from himself. All his life he had looked off somewhere, over the heads of the people around him, yet there was no need to strain his eyes, but only to look right in front of him.
Formerly he had been unable to see the great, the unfathomable and infinite, in anything. He had only sensed that it must be somewhere and had sought for it. In all that was close and comprehensible, he had seen only the limited, the petty, the humdrum, the meaningless. He had armed himself with a mental spyglass and gazed into the distance, where the petty and humdrum, disappearing in the distant mist, had seemed to him great and infinite, only because it was not clearly visible. Thus he had looked at European life, politics, Masonry, philosophy, philanthropy. But even then, in moments he regarded as his own weakness, his mind had penetrated this distance, and there, too, he had seen the petty, the humdrum, the meaningless. Now he had learned to see the great, the eternal, and the infinite in everything, and therefore, in order to see it, to enjoy contemplating it, he had naturally abandoned the spyglass he had been looking through until then over people’s heads, and joyfully contemplated the ever-changing, ever-great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked, the calmer and happier he became. The terrible question “Why?” which formerly had destroyed all his mental constructions, did not exist for him now. Now, to this question “Why?” a simple answer was always ready in his soul: because there is God, that God without whose will not a single hair falls from a man’s head.
XIII
Pierre was almost unchanged in his external ways. To look at, he was exactly the same as he had been before. He was as absentminded as before, and seemed to be taken up not with what was in front of his eyes, but with something special of his own. The difference between his former and present states consisted in the fact that, formerly, when he forgot what was in front of him or what was being said to him, he would wrinkle his brow with suffering, as if trying but unable to make out something far away. Now he forgot what was being said to him and what was before him in the same way; but now, with a barely perceptible, as if mocking smile, he peered at what was in front of him and listened intently to what was being said to him, though he obviously saw and heard something quite different. Formerly he had seemed a kind but unhappy man, and therefore people had involuntarily shunned him. Now a smile of the joy of life constantly played about his lips, and in his eyes shone a sympathy for people—the question: are they as content as I am? And people enjoyed being in his presence.
Formerly he had talked a great deal, had become excited as he talked, and had listened little; now he was rarely carried away by a conversation, and was able to listen so well that people willingly told him their innermost secrets.
The princess, who had never