Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART EIGHT CHAPTER 8
Chapter 8
EVER since, by his beloved brother’s deathbed, Levin had first glanced into the
questions of life and death in the light of these new convictions, as he called
them, which had during the period from his twentieth to his thirty-fourth year imperceptibly
replaced his childish and youthful beliefs–he had been stricken with horror,
not so much of death, as of life, without any knowledge of whence, and why,
and how, and what it was. The physical organization, its decay, the indestructibility
of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, evolution, were the words which
usurped the place of his old belief. These words and the ideas associated with them
were very well for intellectual purposes. But for life they yielded nothing, and Levin
felt suddenly like a man who has changed his warm fur cloak for a muslin garment,
and going for the first time into the frost is immediately convinced, not by reason,
but by his whole nature that he is as good as naked, and that he must infallibly perish
miserably.
From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and still went on living as
before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at his lack of knowledge.
He vaguely felt, too, that what he called his new convictions were not merely
lack of knowledge, but that they were part of a whole order of ideas, in which no
knowledge of what he needed was possible.
At first, marriage, with the new joys and duties bound up with it, had completely
crowded out these thoughts. But of late, while he was staying in Moscow after his
wife’s confinement, with nothing to do, the question that clamored for solution had
more and more often, more and more insistently, haunted Levin’s mind.
The question was summed up for him thus: “If I do not accept the answers Christianity
gives to the problems of my life, what answers do I accept?” And in the
whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from finding any satisfactory answers, he
was utterly unable to find anything at all like an answer.
He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy shops and tool shops.
Instinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with every conversation, with every
man he met, he was on the lookout for light on these questions and their solution.
What puzzled and distracted him above everything was that the majority of men
of his age and circle had, like him, exchanged their old beliefs for the same new
convictions, and yet saw nothing to lament in this, and were perfectly satisfied and
serene. So that, apart from the principal question, Levin was tortured by other questions
too. Were these people sincere? he asked himself, or were they playing a part?
or was it that they understood the answers science gave to these problems in some
different, clearer sense than he did? And he assiduously studied both these men’s
opinions and the books which treated of these scientific explanations.
One fact he had found out since these questions had engrossed his mind, was
that he had been quite wrong in supposing from the recollections of the circle of his
young days at college, that religion had outlived its day, and that it was now practically
non-existent. All the people nearest to him who were good in their lives were
believers. The old prince, and Lvov, whom he liked so much, and Sergey Ivanovitch,
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