Tolstoy and the Meaning of Life

November 8, 2011 in Uncategorized with 2 Comments

I was reminded recently of a parable Leo Tolstoy once told.

Regarding the meaning of life, Count Tolstoy wrote that life’s like a traveler who jumps into a well to escape the “infuriated beast” that has been pursuing him, only to find that there is a dragon at the bottom of the well. The traveler grabs hold of a twig growing in the well, effectively placing him in limbo between the infuriated beast above and the nefarious dragon below. Then, much to his dismay, he sees two mice nibbling on the twig.

All seems lost, but then the traveler notices a few drops of honey at the end of the twig, and he thus begins licking the honey.

Here, Tolstoy lends voice to what it means to be human and to wrestle with our own finitude.

Tolstoy is showing how we, in effort to avoid looking at the death that awaits us, seek any available pleasure to anesthethize and assuage our fear. This doesn’t, of course, refer only to immediate pleasure; all things calculated to set up some future pleasure count as well ( in other words, everything we do).

Even those of us who believe in eternal life are all too familiar with this existential reality, this fear of our own earthly mortality and this desire to find some sort of pleasure by which we can avoid facing the realities of our temporal time on earth.

I have done– and continue to do– so many things that, though I am never aware of it in the moment, are designed to bolster confidence in my immediate identity so as to quiet my fears about my future identity. In other words, while hanging from the tenuous twig of life, I search frantically for new sources of honey.

And, at the end of the day, when I’m thinking straight, I thank God that He is the ultimate honey and that, while some deride this mentality as the recourse of a weak person, of a person who needs to use “God” as a crutch, I take joy and solace in the fact that, at the very root, if approached with a humble and pure heart, that’s precisely what God intended to be, and that’s just the type of person for whom God intended to be it.

  • Matthew Schneider

    From _Anna Karenina_, by Leo Tolstoy, Levin speaking in soliloquy:

    Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this grass and of this beetle (there, she didn’t care for the grass, she’s opened her wings and flown away), there was going on a transformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical, and physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the aspens and the clouds and the misty patches, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from what? into what? –Eternal evolution and struggle. . . . As though there could be any sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished that in spite of the utmost effort of thought along that road I could not discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and yearnings. Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: “To live for God, for my soul.” And this meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mysterious and marvelous. Such, indeed, is the meaning of everything existing.

    I think what he means is that living with faith–that is, with the faith the life is purposeful, not random and purposeless–is to live for God and for the soul. To do so is simple in its intellectual non-complexity, but existentially difficult and infinitely mysterious.

  • Anonymous

    Very interesting.

    The comments Levin speaks about the grass and the beetle and how they are used as examples of God’s grace and provision remind me of Dostoevsky’s Father Zossima’s story (which, btw, I would not have read Brother’s Karamazov had it not been for your suggestion; thanks for that!) about speaking with the young man on his deathbed who explains that he regrets not taking more notice of the beauty of nature while he was well. As I remember it, he speaks of the the way butterflies and birds and grass and trees speak of grace and nourish the soul (or, perhaps this is just how I interpreted it).

    Thanks for sharing this, I think it is spot on!