Levin’s life philosophy.

Levin’s life philosophy.

Konstantin Levin, from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, is one of my favourite characters of all time.  Paralleled with Anna’s angst and self-destruction, his wrestling with life’s big questions, his constant frustration with himself, while marvelling at life’s simple pleasures, reveals to us what is sacred and true. This excerpt comes near the end of the book, and is permanently bookmarked in my notebook.

…

He briefly reviewed the whole course of his thoughts during the last two years, beginning with the clear and obvious thought of death at the sight of his beloved brother hopelessly ill.  

Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself, there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such conditions was impossible; that one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.

But he had done neither the one nor the other, yet he continued to live, think, and feel, had even at that very time got married, experienced many joys, and been happy whenever he was not thinking about the meaning of his life.

What did that show? It showed that he had lived well, but thought badly.

He had lived (without being conscious of it) by those spiritual truths that he had imbibed with his mother’s milk; but in thought he had not only not acknowledged those truths, but had studiously evaded them.

Now it was clear to him that he was only able to live, thanks to the beliefs in which he had been brought up.

‘What should I have been and how should I have lived my life, if I had not had those beliefs, and had not known that one must live for God, and not for one’s own needs? I should have robbed, lied, and murdered. Nothing of that which constitutes the chief joys of my life would have existed for me.’ And although he made the greatest efforts of imagination, he could not picture to himself the bestial creature he would have been, had he not known what he was living for.

‘I looked for an answer to my question. But reason could not give me an answer – reason is incommensurable with the question. Life itself has given me the answer, in my knowledge of what is good and what is bad. And that knowledge I did not acquire in any way; it was given to me as to everybody, given because I could not take it from anywhere.

‘Where did I get it from? Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbour and not throttle him? They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason! Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.’