Anna Karenina

And Levin remembered a recent scene with Dolly and her children. The children, left alone, started roasting raspberries over the candles and squirting streams of milk into their mouths. Their mother, catching them at it, tried to impress upon them, in Levin’s presence, how much work the things they destroyed had cost the grown-ups, and that this work had been done for them, and that if they started breaking cups they would have nothing to drink tea out of, and if they started spilling milk they would have nothing to eat and would die of hunger.

And Levin was struck by the quiet, glum mistrust with which the children listened to their mother. They were merely upset that their amusing game had been stopped and did not believe a word of what she said to them. And they could not believe it, because they could not imagine the full scope of what they enjoyed and therefore could not imagine that they were destroying the very thing they lived by.

‘That all goes without saying,’ they thought, ‘and there’s nothing interesting or important about it, because it has always been so and always will be. And it’s always the same thing over and over. There’s no point in us thinking about it, it’s all ready-made. We’d like to think up some new little thing of our own. So we thought up putting raspberries in a cup and roasting them over a candle, and squirting milk in streams straight into each other’s mouths. It’s fun and new and no worse than drinking from cups.’

‘Don’t we do the same thing, didn’t I, when I sought the significance of the forces of nature and the meaning of human life with reason?’ he went on thinking.

‘And don’t all philosophical theories do the same thing, leading man by a way of thought that is strange and unnatural to him to the knowledge of what he has long known and known so certainly that without it he would not even be able to live? Is it not seen clearly in the development of each philosopher’s theory that he knows beforehand, as unquestionably as the muzhik Fyodor and no whit more clearly than he, the chief meaning of life, and only wants to return by a dubious mental path to what everybody knows?

‘Go on, leave the children alone to provide for themselves, to make the dishes, do the milking and so on. Would they start playing pranks? They’d starve to death. Go on, leave us to ourselves, with our passions and thoughts, with no notion of one God and Creator! Or with no notion of what the good is, with no explanation of moral evil.

‘Go on, try building something without those notions!

‘We destroy only because we’re spiritually sated. Exactly like children!

‘Where do I get the joyful knowledge I have in common with the muzhik, which alone gives me peace of mind? Where did I take it from?

‘Having been brought up with the notion of God, as a Christian, having filled my whole life with the spiritual blessings that Christianity gave me, filled with those blessings myself and living by them, but, like the children, not understanding them, I destroy - that is, want to destroy -what I live by. And as soon as an important moment comes in my life, like children who are cold and hungry, I go to Him, and even less than children scolded by their mother for their childish pranks do I feel that my childish refusal to let well enough alone is not to my credit.

‘Yes, what I know, I do not know by reason, it is given to me, it is revealed to me, and I know it by my heart, by faith in that main thing that the Church confesses.

‘The Church? The Church!’ Levin repeated, turned over on his other side and, leaning on his elbow, began looking into the distance, at the herd coming down to the river on the other bank.

‘But can I believe in everything the Church confesses?’ he thought, testing himself and thinking up everything that might destroy his present peace. He began purposely to recall all the teachings of the Church that had always seemed to him the most strange and full of temptation. ‘Creation? And how do I account for existence? By existence? By nothing? The devil and sin? And how am I to explain evil? ... The Redeemer? ...

‘But I know nothing, nothing, and can know nothing but what I’ve been told along with everybody else.’

And it now seemed to him that there was not a single belief of the Church that violated the main thing - faith in God, in the good, as the sole purpose of man.

In place of each of the Church’s beliefs there could be put the belief in serving the good instead of one’s needs. And each of them not only did not violate it but was indispensable for the accomplishment of that chief miracle, constantly manifested on earth, which consists in it being possible for each person, along with millions of the most diverse people, sages and holy fools, children and old men - along with everyone, with some peasant, with Lvov, with Kitty, with beggars and kings - to understand one and the same thing with certainty and to compose that life of the soul which alone makes life worth living and alone is what we value.