Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART EIGHT CHAPTER 13
Chapter 13
AND Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed between Dolly and her
children. The children, left to themselves, had begun cooking raspberries over
the candles and squirting milk into each other’s mouths with a syringe. Their
mother, catching them at these pranks, began reminding them in Levin’s presence
of the trouble their mischief gave to the grown-up people, and that this trouble was
all for their sake, and that if they smashed the cups they would have nothing to drink
their tea out of, and that if they wasted the milk, they would have nothing to eat, and
die of hunger.
And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with which the children
heard what their mother said to them. They were simply annoyed that their
amusing play had been interrupted, and did not believe a word of what their mother
was saying. They could not believe it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity
of all they habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were
destroying was the very thing they lived by.
“That all comes of itself,” they thought, “and there’s nothing interesting or important
about it because it has always been so, and always will be so. And it’s all always
the same. We’ve no need to think about that, it’s all ready. But we want to invent
something of our own, and new. So we thought of putting raspberries in a cup, and
cooking them over a candle, and squirting milk straight into each other’s mouths.
That’s fun, and something new, and not a bit worse than drinking out of cups.”
“Isn’t it just the same that we do, that I did, searching by the aid of reason for the
significance of the forces of nature and the meaning of the life of man?” he thought.
“And don’t all the theories of philosophy do the same, trying by the path of
thought, which is strange and not natural to man, to bring him to a knowledge of
what he has known long ago, and knows so certainly that he could not live at all
without it? Isn’t it distinctly to be seen in the development of each philosopher’s
theory, that he knows what is the chief significance of life beforehand, just as positively
as the peasant Fyodor, and not a bit more clearly than he, and is simply trying
by a dubious intellectual path to come back to what everyone knows?
“Now then, leave the children to themselves to get things alone and make their
crockery, get the milk from the cows, and so on. Would they be naughty then? Why,
they’d die of hunger! Well, then, leave us with our passions and thoughts, without
any idea of the one God, of the Creator, or without any idea of what is right, without
any idea of moral evil.
“Just try and build up anything without those ideas!
“We only try to destroy them, because we’re spiritually provided for. Exactly like
the children!
“Whence have I that joyful knowledge, shared with the peasant, that alone gives
peace to my soul? Whence did I get it?
“Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life filled with the spiritual
blessings Christianity has given me, full of them, and living on those blessings,
like the children I did not understand them, and destroy, that is try to destroy, what
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