THE READER: An amazing "Confession" by Leo Tolstoy

“Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something.”

Reading a beautiful book “Confession” first published in Russia (1882), which was removed by Orthodox Church censorship and later published in Geneva (1884). In his “Confession”, Leo Tolstoy confronted his own reflections about the will to live, when in the end, it’s all about nothing.  Every moment is a step closer to dying, then why this whole life’s attempt to gain fame, family, friends and power.

This Buddhist influenced treatise on living Christianity through each moment was Tolstoy’s attempt to explain his own rationalist religious feeling. Although the “Confession” led to his excommunication, it also resulted in a large following of Tolstoyan Christians springing up throughout Russia and Europe.

“Whatever the faith may be, and whatever answers it may give, and to whomsoever it gives them, very such answer gives to the finite existence of man an infinite meaning, a meaning not destroyed by sufferings, deprivations, or death. This means that only in faith can we find for life a meaning and a possibility... Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives, he believes in something”. – Leo Tolstoy 1882

Now, some of the most important thoughts from the book that made me think about life differently and more purposefully.

"Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?"
MY NOTES FROM THE BOOK

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From the time I was sixteen I ceased to say my prayers and ceased to go to church or to fast of my own volition. I did not believe what had been taught me in childhood but I believed in something. What it was I believed in I could not at all have said. I believed in a God, or rather I did not deny God – but I could not have said what sort of God. Looking back on that time, I now see clearly that my faith – my only real faith – that which apart from my animal instincts gave impulse to my life – was a belief in perfecting myself... the beginning of it all was of course moral perfection, but that was soon replaced by perfection in general: by the desire to be better not in my own eyes or those of God but in the eyes of other people. And very soon this effort again changed into a desire to be stronger than others: to be more famous, more important and richer than others.

(At twenty-six years of age) I returned to Petersburg after the war, and met the writers. ... The view of life of these people, my comrades in authorship, consisted in this: that life in general goes on developing, and in this development we – men of thought – have the chief part; and among men of thought it is we – artists and poets – who have the greatest influence. Our vocation is to teach mankind.

Tolstoy photographed at his Yasnaya Polyana
estate in May 1908 by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.
The only known color photograph of the writer.

I naively imagined that I was a poet and artist and could teach everybody without myself knowing what I was teaching, and I acted accordingly.

The truth was that life is meaningless. I had as it were lived, lived, and I walked, walked, till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing ahead of me but destruction...

One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud!

"Art, poetry?". . .Under the influence of success and the praise of men, I had long assured myself that this was a thing one could do though death was drawing near – death which destroys all things, including my work and its remembrance; but soon I saw that that too was a fraud. It was plain to me that art is an adornment of life, an allurement to life.

It was pleasant to look at life in the mirror of art. But when I began to seek the meaning of life and felt the necessity of living my own life, that mirror became for me unnecessary, superfluous, ridiculous, or painful.

Now in the experimental sphere I said to myself: "Everything develops and differentiates itself, moving towards complexity and perfection, and there are laws directing this movement. You are a part of the whole. Having learnt as far as possible the whole, and having learnt the law of evolution, you will understand also your place in the whole and will know yourself." Ashamed as I am to confess it, there was a time when I seemed satisfied with that.

And I understood that those sciences are very interesting and attractive, but that they are exact and clear in inverse proportion to their applicability to the question of life: the less their applicability to the question of life, the more exact and clear they are, while the more they try to reply to the question of life, the more obscure and unattractive they become.

These are the direct replies that human wisdom gives when it replies to life's question.

"The life of the body is an evil and a lie. Therefore the destruction of the life of the body is a blessing, and we should desire it," says Socrates.

"Life is that which should not be – an evil; and the passage into Nothingness is the only good in life," says Schopenhauer.

"All that is in the world – folly and wisdom and riches and poverty and mirth and grief – is vanity and emptiness. Man dies and nothing is left of him. And that is stupid," says Solomon.

"To life in the consciousness of the inevitability of suffering, of becoming enfeebled, of old age and of death, is impossible – we must free ourselves from life, from all possible life," says Buddha.

I found that for people of my circle there were four ways out of the terrible position in which we are all placed.

1)    The first was that of ignorance. It consists in not knowing, not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity.

2)    The second way out is Epicureanism. It consists, while knowing the hopelessness of life, in making use meanwhile of the advantages one has...

3)    The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and an absurdity.

4)    The fourth way out is that of weakness. It consists in seeing the truth of the situation and yet clinging to life, knowing in advance that nothing can come of it. People of this kind know that death is better than life, but not having the strength to act rationally – to end the deception quickly and kill themselves – they seem to wait for something. This is the escape of weakness, for if I know what is best and it is within my power, why not yield to what is best? . . . I found myself in that category.

Tolstoy dressed
in peasant clothing by Ilya Repin (1901)

My position was terrible. I knew I could find nothing along the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life; and there – in faith – was nothing but a denial of reason, which was yet more impossible for me than a denial of life.

Whatever the faith may be, and whatever answers it may give, and to whomsoever it gives them, every such answer gives to the finite existence of man an infinite meaning, a meaning not destroyed by sufferings, deprivations, or death. This means that only in faith can we find for life a meaning and a possibility. ...but faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something.

I began to understand that in the replies given by faith is stored up the deepest human wisdom and that I had no right to deny them on the ground of reason, and that those answers are the only ones which reply to life's question.

I understood that my question as to what my life is, and the answer – an absurdity and evil – was quite correct. The only mistake was that the answer referred only to my life, while I had referred it to life in general. "Life is evil and an absurdity", referred only to my life, but not to human life in general.

A goat, a hare, and a wolf are so made that they must feed themselves, and must breed and feed their family, and when they do so I feel firmly assured that they are happy and that their life is a reasonable one. Then what should a man do? He too should produce his living as the animals do, but with this difference, that he will perish if he does it alone; he must obtain it not for himself but for all. And when he does that, I have a firm assurance that he is happy and that his life is reasonable.

If I exist, there must be some cause for it, and a cause of causes. And that first cause of all is what men have called "God". And I paused on that thought, and tried with all my being to recognize the presence of that cause. And as soon as I acknowledged that there is a force in whose power I am, I at once felt that I could live.

"He exists," said I to myself. And I had only for an instant to admit that, and at once life rose within me, and I felt the possibility and joy of being.

I need only be aware of God to live; I need only forget Him, or disbelieve Him, and I died.

I live, really live, only when I feel Him and seek Him.

I returned to a belief in God, in moral perfection, and in a tradition transmitting the meaning of life. There was only this difference, that then all this was accepted unconsciously, while now I knew that without it I could not live.

That shore was God; that direction was tradition; the oars were the freedom given me to pull for the shore and unite with God. And so the force of life was renewed in me and I again began to live.

... the essence of every faith consists in its giving life a meaning which death does not destroy.

Mohandas K. Gandhi and other residents of Tolstoy Farm, South Africa, 1910
The Tolstoy Farm was created by Gandhi ji, In part, influenced by these ideas..

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Hope you have liked reading this book with me, for more info on the book, click here to go to the Wikipedia...

Image curtsy : Wikipedia

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ॐ नमः शिवाय

Om Namah Shivaya

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FEATURE: Letters To A Young Poet - Amazing Voice Of Solitude, RILKE

“When a truly great and unique spirit speaks, the lesser ones must be silent”

Rainer Rilke's Classic Book

As I keep repeating, sometimes the book chooses you rather than you choosing the book. When the time is right, suddenly a book drops into your lap like a blessing and leaves an eternal. This book “The Letters To A Young Poet” is one such book that has left me immersed in my own solitude without the fear of being alone and changed the way I look at my own doubts.

The “Letters To A Young Poet” is a deceptively simple book. The letters were originally written to Franz Kappus, a 19-year-old officer cadet at the Vienna Military Academy, of which Rainer Maria Rilke was an alumnus. Discouraged by the prospect of life in the Austro-Hungarian Army, Kappus began to send his poetry to the 27-year-old Rilke, seeking both literary criticism and career advice. Their correspondence lasted from 1902 to 1908. In 1929, three years after Rilke's death, Kappus assembled and published the ten letters.

Franz in his introduction says, “Important alone are the ten letters – important for the understanding of the world in which Rainer Maria Rilke lived and worked, important also for the many who are growing and evolving now and shall in the future. When a truly great and unique spirit speaks, the lesser ones must be silent”

Through his letters, Rilke guides the young boy, Franz, out of the labyrinths of doubts, answering his questions about life, love, loneliness, passion and sex as well about God. An amazing book which in my opinion needs to be read by every aspiring artist, young people and anyone is afraid to be alone in one’s own solitude.

BRIEF NOTE ON THE GREAT POET RAINER MARIA RILKE

Rainer Maria Rilke

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian-Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety: themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. Among English-language readers, his best-known work is the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.

TEXT AND IMAGE CURTSY : Wikipedia 

THOUGHTS FROM “LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET”

Foreword:

“All of us who labor in the arts know that it can be a lonely existence. We often find ourselves living a life of solitary dreams, disconnected from others, and driven by a vision that no one else seems to value or share. On some days, this can becomes overwhelming. We then thirst for a single voice of understanding that will reach into our solitary lives and reassure us that the path we have chosen is worthy, and that the rewards it offers are worth the loneliness it entails.” – By Kent Nerburn

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For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving is merely a preparation.

The Walk by Rainer Rilke

Put it (The need to write) to this test: does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, “I must,” then build your life upon it.

Do not write love poems, at least at first; they present the greatest challenge. It requires great, fully ripened power to produce something personal, something unique, when there are so many good and sometimes even brilliant renditions in great numbers.

If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself. 

Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth. For the creative artist there is no poverty – nothing is insignificant or unimportant.

A piece of art is good if it is born of necessity. This, its source, is its criterion; there is no other.

To feel that one could live without writing is enough indication that, in fact, one should not.

We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important to us.

Scale the depths of things; irony will never descend there.

Portrait of Rilke
by Paula Modersohn Becker
c1900

To be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree, which does not force its sap, but stands unshaken in the storms of spring with no feat that summer might not follow.

Actually the creative experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, close to its pain and its pleasure, that both phenomena are only different forms of the same longing and bliss.

To cope with sexuality is difficult. Yes, but everything assigned to us is a challenge; nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.

Spiritual creativity originates from the physical. They are of the same essence - only spiritual creativity is a gentler, more blissful, and more enduring repetition of physical desire and satisfaction.

Reflect on the world that you carry within yourself. And name this thinking what you wish… Your innermost happening is worth all your love.

For what would aloneness be, you ask yourself if it did not possess greatness? There exists only one aloneness, and it is great, and it is not easy to bear.

Your innermost happening is worth all you love. You must somehow work on that.

Why don’t you think of Him (God) as the coming one, who has been at hand since eternity, the future one, the final fruit of tree, with us as its leaves?

Don’t you see that everything that happens becomes a beginning again and again? Could it not be His beginning, since a beginning is in itself is always so beautiful?

…we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.

To love is also good, for love is difficult. For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that string for which all other striving is merely preparation.

However the process of learning always involves time set aside for solitude. Thus to love constantly and far into a lifespan is indeed aloneness, heightened and deepened aloneness for one who loves.

Love does not at first have nothing to do with arousal, surrender, and uniting with another being – for what union can be built upon uncertainty, immaturity, and lack of coherence?

Young people often err, and that intensely so, in the way, since it is their nature to be impatient: The throw themselves at each other when love comes upon them. They fragment themselves, just as they are, in all of their disarray and confusion. But what is to follow? What should fate do if this takes root, this heap of half-broken things that they call togetherness and that they would like to call their happiness?

Don’t believe that this idea of a great love, which, when you were a boy, was imposed upon you, has been lost… I believe that this idea of love remains so strong and mighty in your memory because it was your first deep experience of aloneness and the first inner work that you have done on your life.

Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous. Perhaps everything fearful is basically helplessness that seeks our help.

It’s often the name of the crime upon which a life shatters, not the nameless and personal act itself at all.

Allow life to happen to you. Believe me, life is right in all cases.

All feelings that integrate and inspire are pure. Impure is the feeling that touches only one side of your being and is tearing you up so.

Act with alertness (on your doubts) and responsibility, each and every time, and the day will come when doubt will change from a destroyer to become one of your best fellow-workers, perhaps the wisest of all that have a part in building your life.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight
of being no one's sleep under so
many lids.
-Epitaph on the grave of Rainer Rilke in Geneva, chosen by himself

Art also is only a way of life, and we can, no matter how we live, and without knowing it, prepare ourselves for it.

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Hope you have liked this feature, please do leave your comment and thoughts below.

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ॐ नमः शिवाय

Om Namah Shivaya

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