War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [739]
A bee sitting on a flower stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and says that a bee’s purpose consists in stinging people. A poet admires a bee sucking from the cup of a flower and says that a bee’s purpose consists in sucking up the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, noting how a bee gathers flower pollen and brings it to the hive, says that a bee’s purpose consists in gathering honey. Another beekeeper, who has studied the life of a hive more closely, says that a bee collects pollen in order to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that its purpose consists in reproducing its kind. A botanist notes that, as a bee lands with pollen on the pistil of a dioecious flower, it fertilizes it, and in that the botanist sees the bee’s purpose. Another, observing the migration of plants, sees that the bee contributes to that migration, and this new observer may say it is in this that the bee’s purpose consists. But the final purpose of the bee is exhausted neither by the one, nor the other, nor the third purpose that human reason is able to discover. The higher human reason rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious for it is the inaccessibility of the final purpose.
All that is accessible to man is the observation of the correspondence between the life of a bee and other phenomena of life. It is the same for the purposes of historical figures and peoples.
V
The wedding of Natasha, who married Bezukhov in the year thirteen, was the last joyful event in the family of the old Rostovs. Count Ilya Andreevich died that same year, and, as always happens, with his death the old family broke up.
The events of the past year—the Moscow fire and the flight from it, the death of Prince Andrei and Natasha’s despair, the death of Petya, the countess’s grief—all this, like one blow after another, fell on the old count’s head. It seemed he did not understand and felt unable to understand the significance of all these events, and morally bowed his old head, as if expecting and asking for new blows that would finish him off. He seemed now frightened and perplexed, now unnaturally animated and enterprising.
Natasha’s wedding occupied him for some time by its external side. He ordered dinners, suppers, and obviously wanted to appear cheerful; but his cheerfulness did not communicate itself as formerly, but, on the contrary, evoked compassion in people who knew and loved him.
After the departure of Pierre and his wife, he grew quiet and began to complain of anguish. A few days later he fell ill and took to his bed. Despite the doctors’ reassurances, he understood from the first days of his illness that he would not get up again. The countess spent two weeks in an armchair by his bedside without undressing. Each time she gave him his medicine, he sobbed and silently kissed her hand. On the last day, weeping, he begged forgiveness of his wife and absent son for having ruined their property—the chief guilt he felt hanging over him. Having taken communion and been anointed, he died quietly, and the next day a crowd of acquaintances, who came to pay their last respects to the deceased, filled the Rostovs’ rented apartment. All these acquaintances, who had dined and danced so many times in his house, who had laughed at him so many times, now said with the same feeling of inner reproach and affection, as if justifying themselves before someone: “Yes, be that as it may, he was an excellent man. You don’t meet such men nowadays…And who doesn’t have his weaknesses?…”
Precisely at a time when the count’s affairs had become so entangled that it was impossible to imagine how it would all end if it went on a year longer, he unexpectedly died.
Nikolai was with the Russian troops in Paris when the news of his father’s death reached him. He immediately sent in his resignation