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tians. I have learned to love them very much. . . .
I want to write out the whole Declaration of Faith from the beginning again. Yesterday there was a good letter from Verigin, Peter. 130
All last night I thought about the meaning of life and though there are other things to note down, I want to note down this :
The whole world is nothing else than an in-finite space filled with infinitely small, colourless, silently moving particles of matter. At bottom, even this is not so; I know that they are particles of matter only through their impenetrability, but the impenetrability I know only through my sense of touch and my muscle sense. If I did not have this sense, I would not know about impenetrability or about matter. As to motion, also, I, strictly speaking, have no right to speak, because if I did not have the sense of sight or again muscle sense, I would not know anything about motion either.
So that all that I have the right to assert about the outer world is that something exists, some-thing entirely unknown to me, as it was said long ago both by the Brahmins and by Kant and by Berkeley. There is some kind of occasion, some kind of grain of sand which causes irritation in the shell of the snail and produces a pearl (secretion, secretion in the snail). This is our whole outside world.
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What is there then ? There is myself with my representations of myself, of the sun, trees, ani-mals, stones. But what then is it that I call my-self? Is it something arbitrary depending on my-self? No, it is something independent of myself, predetermined. I can not not be myself, and not have that representation which I have, namely, that I include in myself a small part of these moving atoms and call them myself. And all the other remaining atoms I see in the form of be-ings .more or less like myself. The world ap-pears to me to consist entirely of beings which are like me or resemble me. 131
(I have become confused, yet have something to say. I am going to try when I have the strength. )
I am continuing to write out what I had to say and what I dreamt of all night, namely :
People think that their life is in the body, that from that which takes place in the body; from breathing, nutrition, circulation of the blood, etc., life flows. And this seems unquestionable; let nutrition, breathing, circulation of the blood cease and life will end. But what ends is the life of the body, life in this body. . . .
And in fact if you consider that life comes from the process of the body and only in the body then as soon as the processes of the body are ended, then life ought to be ended. But certainly this is an arbitrary assertion. No one has proven and
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can prove that life is only in the body and can not be without the body. To assert this, is all the same as asserting that when the sun has set then the sun has come to an end. One must first de-cide what is life. Is it that which I see in the others as it begins and stops, or is it what I know in myself? If it is what I know in myself, then it is the only thing that is and therefore it can not be destroyed. And the fact that in bodies before me processes end which are connected with life in me and in other beings, shows me only this, that life goes away somewhere from my sensual eyes. To go away entirely, to be destroyed, it absolutely can not be, because outside of it there is nothing in the world. The problem, then, might be this : Will my life be destroyed, can it be destroyed? And the destruction of the body of a man, is that a sign of the destruction of his life? In order to answer this question one must first decide what is life ?
Life is the consciousness of my separateness from other beings, of the existence of other beings and of those limits which separate me from them. My life is not bound up with my body. There may be a body, but no consciousness of separate-ness like for a sleeping one, an idiot, an embryo or for those who have fits.
It is true that there can be no life without the consciousness of the body; but that is because life
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is the consciousness of one’s own separateness and of one’s own boundaries. But the consciousness of one’s own separateness and of one’s own bound-aries happens in our life in time and space, but it can happen in any other way and therefore the destruction of the body is not the sign of the de-struction of life.
(Not clear and not what I want to say.) Oct. u. Y. P. If I live.
To-day October 20. Y. P. Morning.
I feel like writing down three things.
i) In a work of art the principal thing is the soul of the author. Therefore among medium productions the feminine ones are the better, the more interesting. A woman will push her-self through now and then, speak out the most inner mysteries of her soul; and that is what is needed. You see what she really loves, although she pretends that she loves something else. When an author writes, we the readers place our ears to his breast and we listen and say, “ Breathe. If you have rumblings, they will appear.” And women haven’t the capacity of hiding. Men have learned literary methods and you can no longer see him behind his manner, except that you know he is stupid. But what is in his soul, you don’t see.
(Not good; malicious.) 78
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The 2nd thing I wanted to write was that yes-terday, in blowing out my candle, I began to feel for matches and did not find them, and an un-easiness came over me. “And you are getting ready to die ! What, then, are you also going to die with matches?” I said to myself. And I at once saw in the dark my real life and became calm.
What is this fear of the dark? Besides the fear at the incapability of meeting whatever ac-cident might happen, it is the fear at the ab-sence of the delusion of our most important sense, that of sight. It is fear before the contemplation of our true life. I now no longer have that fear on the contrary, that which had been fear is now peace; there only has remained the habit of fear; but to the majority of people the fear is exactly of that which alone can give them peace.
The 3rd thing I wanted to write was that when a man is put in the necessity of choosing between an act which is clearly beneficial to others, but with the thwarting of the demands of conscience (the will of God), then the problem is only one of short-sightedness, because the man sees in the immediate future the good which will arise from his act, if he thwarts the will of God, but he does not see in the more remote future the other good, which is an infinite number of times greater, which
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will come from the abstention of this act and the fulfilment of the will of God. It is the same kind of thing that children do, destroying the gen-eral order of a house which is necessary for their own happiness, for the sake of the immediate pleasure of play.
The fact is that for the work of God and for man accomplishing the work of God, time does not exist. Man can not but represent to himself everything in time, and therefore in order to cor-rectly judge of the importance of the work of God, he has to represent it to himself in the very re-mote future, even in infinite time. The fact, that I will not kill the murderer and will forgive him, that I shall die unseen by any one, fulfilling the will of God, will bear its own fruit … if I in-sist upon thinking in terms of time in infinite time. But it will bear its fruit surely.
I have to finish the former :
4) Refinement and power in art are almost always diametrically opposed.
5) Is it true that works of art are obtained by assiduous work? That which we call a work of art yes. But is it real art?
6) The Japanese sang and we could not re-strain ourselves from laughter. If we had sung before the Japanese they would have laughed. The more so had Beethoven been played for them. Indian and Greek temples are understood by all.
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And Greek statues are understood by all. And our best painting is also understandable. So that architecture, sculpture, painting, having reached their perfection, have reached also cosmopolitan-ism, accessibility to all. To the same point in some of its manifestations has the art of speech reached; in the teaching of Buddha, of Christ, in the poetry of Sakia-Muni, Jacob, Joseph. In dramatic art; Sophocles, Aristophanes did not reach it. It
