Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 4 of 13

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
The Kingdom of God is Within You.
The Later Religious Writings of the “Grandfather Sage”
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 26, 1984

Transcript:
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The date is July 26th, 1984. This is the fourth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger, where a pray Lord loot to the 20th century. Tonight's lecture is on Tolstoy who lived 1828 to 1910. The kingdom of the God is within you. The later religious writings of the grandfathers say, okay, if we can recap where we are,
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It's difficult to have, um, orientation. When Tolstoy was, um, experimenting with education, he discovered that you don't have to have a pre-planned order for education, that education, as you begin to become interested in life and involve yourself, um, an order comes up and the more you get into a relational meaning the more you develop a sense of order. So I usually don't write anything down, but I have to keep track mentally of where we are because we're painting a very large tapestry. We're working on something that'll take about six or seven years to complete, and we've already done four and a half. So we've come a long way. And in fact, we've done Tolstoy once before in a 19th century course, we took the 19th century as a historical phenomenon. You can do that. You can take human time as a phenomenon. You can say it's the 19th century and it has a certain shape.
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And we went through the 19th century and we discovered that Tolstoy was the apotheosis of the 19th century. He was the apex. He was the combination. He was the ultimate map of the 19th century. He was an extraordinary individual and only after we had done 12 lectures through the 19th century and got to the 13th and Tolstoy, where were we able to appreciate his strategic importance? I can't redo that for you here tonight, but all of these lectures exist on tapes and all these tapes can be had just simply for a nominal sum from my friend John Rice line here. So the lecture on Tolstoy tonight assumes a lot of the, that was in that lecture, but I'll catch it up in brief form. The reason for all these patterned lecture series is to dovetail and present history. From a human standpoint, we in our time are drowning in the tail end of a fierce war of ideologies.
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And ideational histories are the bane of our intelligence today. And so we're purposely moving outside of the normal realms of history. And we're talking only if people like ourselves human beings and our only center are interesting human characters positioned in a sequence roughly in terms of when they lived, when they flourished, when they were born, when they die, the orders that we're discovering or that we Intuit come because of our acquaintance in a sequential way, because we also are human beings that are rather sensitive to life. None of you would be here if you were not sensitive to some process happening in life, some sense of pattern.
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So that Tolstoy now comms for the second time, we've handled some individuals as many as four times live nets because of his incredible position in Western history, we had to handle four times four separate ways. So now we come to Tulsa again, and we'll also come to Tolstoy again next year at the tail end of next year, after we do an American series in 1985, we're going to do the secret American tradition. The tradition is no longer taught in universities, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, John Dewey, William James people. I don't mention much anymore in universities and especially don't give courses out well, we have a great tradition. And at the end of the American tradition, we needed to bring Tolstoy. And again, in fact, it came as rather shocked that after a long life, which we'll see, and he had refined his views on man on Christianity, on the ethical needs for man to not resist evil.
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He found that this was a law, but this was an ultimate ethical law. And when he published his book, someone wrote him from the United States and said, you know, these ideas were published by my father in 1838, William Lloyd Garrison. And that some of the writings of Garrison were then forwarded to Tolstoy. Some of the writer, writings of the Boston pacifist, Aiden Ballou were forwarded to him. And he discovered that there had been Americans busy for a half century trying to refine and put into practice these ideals, which he independently had discovered hard won. So we have a great tradition. We'll come back to Tolstoy again at the end of 85, the emphasis tonight is on Tolstoy after writing war and peace. And I'll catch up a little bit, a little bit of his life. So you get a setting for it. But in particular, I want to emphasize the decade of the 1870s because by 1882 Tolstoy had suffered a sea change and would never again be the same sort of man that he had been. Well, what sort of man was he?
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He was born in 1828 and came from a very distinguished family on his mother's side. He was descended from the Vulcan skis, princess principal. Konski in fact, his mother's father, his maternal grandfather was a very great general and had in fact become disgusted with war and had gone back to the family estate with his young daughter who was Tolstoy's mother and tried to raise her in a decent, ethical way. In fact, raised her to, to ride and to hunt rather like a boy. So she was an exceedingly interesting woman and that estate then passed to her hands and through her, it became Tolstoy's and that state's name is famous around the world. It's he has Neha pulley on the home of Leo Tolstoy for most of his adult life.
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The toll stories themselves were somewhat less nobility. The Volkov gays had been descended in direct line from Rubrik, who was a Viking, who was the founder of the Russian empire in Russian history. When the Vikings came down, the river valleys, they represented a powerful organizing force that had not been seen in those regions of the steps and, uh, the inner terrain of what is now Russia, and because of the cross-currents of the times they hasn't of the land, ask the Viking, um, individuals who came in to become a ruling class to protect them. And so a feudal order was set up with a Viking families on top and the Russian peasants, uh, collectively helping them and a whole notion of serfdom, not slavery, but serfdom evolved very close to slavery, but, um, it was a symbiotic social relationship. That relationship lasted until 1861 and the serfs were freed in 1861 until then there was the master, the aristocrat, and the vast population on the land serves.
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Some families owned as many as 200,000 serves so that Russia in the 19th century was a completely different society from one which we might imagine. And Leo Tolstoy was born into this aristocratic, uh, sector, the highest level he was sent as a student to university in Causa, not in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but in Casa, which is actually in a Totara Tarjay the Tartars of course, uh, very, uh, courageous people, quite different from the Russians. A friend of mine, uh, from Canada, a Turkish individual, when he was in Cazan about 10 or 15 years ago, they discovered that he could speak as her by Johnny. And as soon as they discovered this, a whole collection of engineers came around him. And in first of whispers, they told him we are not rushing. We were charters, we were different. So the Russia of our monolithic imagination actually does not exist in, has never existed in history.
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And the Russia of Tolstoy is the strategic point at which the ancient history for a thousand years came to a fruition and in the spirit and language and character of Tolstoy, it found its annunciation of certain basic discoveries and principles about man. And they have not been improved upon until the present day. That is to say the entire history of the 20th century in Russia has been a backsliding away from the discovery of man. And in fact, they Russia of 1984 resembles more a creation of the Byzantine empire. Then the historical Russia that frees the search in 1861. We don't understand that yet today. We don't still have a conception of the incredible reoccurring pattern that we are caught up in, but we are reliving very much the 12th century in the 20th century, the kingdom of Arkray was exactly the same size as the state of Israel.
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And all of the participants in that vast struggle in the 12th century are in power again and holding very similar views. So when we're talking about Tolstoy as a Russian, he is not a Sylvia at all. He belongs to that ancient order, which really could be characterized as Russian. When he got to university. He discovered in talking with other students that he had absolutely no religious leanings whatsoever. He said in his writing later on that at the age of 17 or 18, he had a vague notion that there must be a God what God was. He could not have said he had some idea that perhaps Christ was real, but what his teachings, where he really couldn't say, and he had absolutely no compunction to say prayers, or to go to church and consider all of this, literally a waste of time, something which was handed to children to keep them quiet.
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And that was about it. After university, he found himself trying to establish himself as a young man in all the ways, the poor ways in which aristocratic youth used to establish themselves drinking card, playing, uh, visiting brothels, um, duels, this kind of commotion. What did his brothers see that Leo was sliding very fast, took him along with him. When he received a military assignment in the Caucasian mountain regions of south Russia, Georgia, we would know it as today. And so Tolstoy with him and they're received his baptism into real manhood and towards the end of his life, the old Wiley Leo Tolstoy, who had given up we're writing great fiction for some 20 years returned back to them that scene of his achievement of a sense of what it was to be a man and what it was to be a human being on the earth and wrote one of his greatest works.
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They short novel called hot Jay Morocco. Haji is a, an honorable person in Islam. It's someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and has returned. And so this was an, an honorable warrior I'll towards the end of tonight, try and read you a page or maybe two pages from Haji moron, right? You can see that he lost none of his touch. It was published after his death. It was written in 1904. He would die in 1910 and Haji Mirage. And a few other works from his table were published posthumously in 1911. So Tolstoy found the experience in the caucuses extreme and really formative for himself. And he began doing some writing. He found him self back in St. Petersburg and very quickly fell in with the literary center, a circle that was centered upon a man named Nick Rusof, who published a periodical, entitled the contemporary and in this writers group, this writers clinic where Turgenev and, uh, uh, a number of other individuals struck off a, they were associated somewhat with the Dostoevsky's, um, literary groups.
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And so Tolstoy found himself being shattered as the most promising young writer in Russia. And instead of buckling down to work this, he began to slide back into his old habits and ways. So that Turgenev became disgusted with him. When going to visit him one day arriving about one o'clock in the afternoon, saw him lying, still crumpled on the sheets, not able to rise for several hours more and had been out, uh, corrupting himself were all, he was worth not only the night before, but every night of several months before they entered upon a feud, which lasted for 17 years. Yes, Turgenev was one of those great gentlemen writers for whom the written word was a matter of handcrafted pride. His friends were individuals like flaw bear in France. And in fact, the French literary style very much influenced or gained. And for him, writing was difficult.
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It was a matter of great craftsmanship for Tolstoy. It was almost an unconscious talent, which he had in such abundance that when he wrote it was like a miraculous discovery of what written language could be. I remember reading once in one of Tomas Mons essays. And he said, when we discover a real lion like Tolstoy, we realized how much like mice, the rest of us writers really off, but tolls do. I was unable to adapt himself either to the position as a literary man or as a military man or as an aristocrat. And in the late 1850s, something welled up in him and he left St. Petersburg, and he went back to Yesenia, pull the on him. And of all things, he began opening a one-room school house for the peasant children surf hill.
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This was unheard of. They were never given any real education. Tolstoy's experiment was a shocker. He, within several months had more than 50 students in his one room school house and began to take very seriously. The task of becoming a teacher and educator. Really the teacher is one who could teach a lesson. An educator is one who draws out the human being so caught was a in this educational experiment that he completely left off writing. He took a grand tour. He went through, um, France and England. He went as far down in Francis Marsay. He went to London, he went in search of education. He visited a number of individuals at this time. I think Matthew Arnold was the head of, um, an educational situation in England. But what Tolstoy learned there was that everywhere in Europe that he went, children were not educated. They were forced brutally to study the lessons that were put before them.
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They were expected to memorize and to regurgitate what they had memorized. And then they were literally mechanically pushed along, various levels turned out. And that as far as he could see, people were not educated in school. How then do they become human? And Tolstoy's answer was that man is educated by life and not by school, that it is life. That gives us the relational sense that if we had to depend upon the school learning, we would all be complete idiots. So he went back to Yasmina polio, and he devoted himself for about two years to creating one of the first real great textbooks was called his ABC book. Sometimes he liked to refer to it in his correspondence as his primmer.
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And so we devoted the years between 1859 and 1862 to composing stories, fables, um, educational writings in the form of diaries, in the form of experiments with classwork, he'd been, he began writing little vignettes of botany, zoology of physics, of mathematics, all for the different grades of children. It's very difficult to find this. A friend of good friend of mine found a copy of this for 50 cents. They were throwing it away from the Los Angeles public library. And that's what's happening in our time. That's exactly what's happening. So we have to rescue these things in this. Here's a little fable. He wrote that he put in his primmer called the Wolf and the Huntsman it's uh, oh, about 10 lines. A Wolf was eating up the sheep. The Huntsman discovered him and began to beat him. The Wolf said it is not right for you to beat me.
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It is not my fault that I'm a wild beast. God made me sell. But the Huntsman replied, we do not beat walls because they are wild beasts. But because they, the sheet, this is Joyce fables here is from the new speller. These were lessons that were given to the children so that they would learn to spell all the words together. Instead of learning lists of words, you would give them little stories and they would have to learn to spell all the words in the story. They would have to copy them out. And then these stories were read to them and then they would learn the vocabulary because it was an interesting little story. This one's about a page. So this is an example from Tolstoy's new speller, probably about 18 60, 18 61. It's called the big oven. Once upon a time, a man had a big house and in the house, there was a big, uh, but this man's family was small, only himself and his wife.
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When winter came, the man tried to keep his oven going. And in one month he burned up all this firewood. He had nothing to feed the fire and it was cold. Then the man began to break up his fences and use the boards for fuel. When he had burnt up all his fences, the house now, without any protection against the wind was colder than ever and still, they had no firewood. Then the man began to tear down the ceiling of his house and burn that in the oven. A neighbor noticed that he was tearing down his ceiling and said to him, why neighbor have you lost your mind, pulling down your ceiling and winter, you and your life will freeze to death. But the man said, no, brother, you see, I am pulling down my ceiling. So as to have something to heat, my oven width, we have such a curious one.
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The more I heat it up, the colder we are, the neighbor laughed and said, well, then after you have burnt up your ceiling, then you will be tearing down your house. You won't have anywhere to live. Only the oven will be left. And even that will be cold. Well, that is mine. Misfortune said the man, all my neighbors have firewood enough for all winter, but I have already burnt out my fences in the ceiling of my house. And I have nothing left. The neighbor replied, all you need is to have your oven rebuilt. But the man said, interrupting. I know well that you are jealous of my house and my oven because they are both larger than yours. So you advise me to rebuild it. So he turned it deaf near through his neighbors advice and burned up a ceiling and burned up his whole house and had to go and live with strangers. [inaudible].
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These are examples from Tolstoy's, uh, primmer, the textbook. He had collected textbooks in French and English and German throughout the continent had compared them. And he had found that none of them would do. And that's why he was writing his own, but also in the textbook, in his Premar available to the students, notice where his own observations on what was going on his own descriptions of what he was doing, what actually did happen, what he was trying to make out of it. So that the textbook for the students was a reflective record of the process itself. Very wise, something incidentally later on that John and Evelyn doing what, uh, experiment with in the United States. This is, uh, a little section about a paragraph on the classes. The two smaller classes are put by themselves in one room. The older scholars are in another. When the teacher goes to the first class, all gathered around him at the Blackboard, or sit on the benches or they climb on the table and sit down around him or one of those that are reading.
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So the children collect around the teacher. If it happens to be for writing, they take more comfortable positions, but they keep getting up. So as to look at each other's copy box and show their own to the teacher, in other words is there's freedom of movement. While they're doing their assignments, they can peek at each other and see what they're doing. It is calculated that the time till dinner will be occupied by four lessons, they used to, um, start from eight o'clock in the morning and go till noon. And then they would have a break from noon to three, and then come back from three to six. And Telstar records that very often, when the children got interested in education, they would stay. And of course, when they stayed after six, they would be hungry. So Tolstoy would feed them so forth. So they, they love is really, um, quite apparent here.
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Sometimes the t-shirt and the pupils get carried away. And instead of one hour, the class lasts three hours. There have been cases where the pupils themselves cried more and more, and they explained against those things, which bore them. This is stupid. Go to the little ones. They cry contemptuously in the class for religious instruction, which is the only one that has held with any approach to regularity because the teacher lives to verus away and comes only twice a week. And in the drawing class, all the pupils are gathered together. All ages before these classes begin liveliness racket and external disorder are the rule of the day. One drag benches from one room into the other, another scuffles. And other goes home to the mansion after bread. Another heats that bread in the oven, another borrow something, another goes through gymnastic exercises, but just the same as in the Tomo to the morning, it is far or easy to bring order out of chaos by leaving them to their natural impulses.
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Then by setting them down, mainly by forest Tolstoy will record later on that the most important aspect of a school is the vitality of the spirit of that school. That there are, there are no other sacrosanct rules. There are no other norms for form that are necessary education, except you respect the spirit of the school. He writes thanks to the vitality in the spirit of the school, especially when it's older pupils returned from their village occupations. This method of reading failed of itself, and the began to grow listless, to play pranks and cut their lessons. That is to say they were left to be demonstrative. If they were bored, they could walk out. Also, the teacher had to write the right if the teacher was bored to send them away. So there was a reciprocal relationship going on. The lessons had to be interesting to all of us parties in order for them to go on.
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And they discovered that the most difficult part of education was the acquiring of reading skills. And that in fact, all of the mechanical lessons and they tried many systems produced only a lack of attentiveness and finally, a lack of memorizing capacity. No one remembered what they had read a few months before, or even a few days before what was needed then was that in terms of the spirit of the school to find a reading order that would work and the method that was found, if you can call it a method was to let them find their own that each student had an approach, which they would work out for themselves. And if one only kept the interest high and the spirit of the vitality of the school integral that the students would find
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Some way for themselves
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To acquire the skills to participate. One needed no other rules than that. As I say, the premiere is very hard to find this is a 1917
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Translation.
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That's the only one I've ever seen. Usually in collected works of Tolstoy. You'll find it. Uh, it's sometimes mislabeled it's called the long exile and other stories. But that volume is really Tolstoy's. Tremor is ABC book by 1862 in the spring Tolstoy, all of a sudden was filled and fed up with education and he quit. Something was unsatisfactory to him. He records later on in his confession that he should have realized right then and there that something basic was wrong. That something fundamental in him had spoken, not with language, but what the feeling tone, the feeling tone of blankness.
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But instead he covered it up and he went into a torrential period for 15 years, Tolstoy became the novelists, probably the greatest novelist who's ever lived and a family man. He covered up the perception of some blankness in himself by just a whirlwind of activity. He began writing war and peace, which took him several years. He went through a false engagement to a neighbor and then married a Sophie. They proceeded to have a family and children came and Warren peace established him as the foremost novelist of his day. And then all this Tolstoy proceeded to go along until the 1870s and the letters
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Of the 1870s, we find
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Indications is there only is 1871, okay.
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That his intuitions of himself are quite accurate. He writes, I don't allow my spiritual longing to well up in me. I never think about you and the children. And I don't allow myself to think because I'm tempted to do so. Every moment, if I were to think hard, I should go away at once. I don't understand my condition either. I caught a cold in the tent during the first cold night or else. The kumus is bad for me. Well, I've been worse in the three days I've been here. The main thing is weakness, depression,
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But then he covers it up. He covers it up with extensive correspondence. One piece of established him as an international figure, established him as the central person in the Russian literary movement. Very often his most revealing letters are to N N struck off. He
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Writes from Yasnaya Polyana, March 3rd, 1872.
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My primmer is finished in this being printed very slowly and badly, but then my usual way, I'm scribbling over everything and altering everything 20 times over because of this, I didn't send it to the Dawn, a magazine between ourselves. Let it be said that this promise embarrasses me. He promised the Dawn to send them something it's so worthless in the stipulation that it should be something out of the primmer will destroy everything that my name might've meant. If it's at all possible for you to obtain my release, you would greatly obliged me. If there was any merit in the premier PRI primary articles, it would lie in the simplicity and clarity of stroking lie. In other words, the language, and then the journal, a literary journal, this would be strange and disagreeable. And then he goes on to give a theory of history to strike off. We find in his letters all during the early 1870s indications, that Tolstoy as covering up with a maths, literary activity, a perception of himself, he has developing his intellectual capacities. He's able to talk about, uh, almost anything under the sun. And yet there creep into his letters from time to time, revealing sentences and statements.
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He gets headaches. They go on for days, he becomes uncomfortable. He becomes somewhat depressed, and then he takes up another sec, um, subject. And finally, we begin to find towards the middle of the 1870s, he's writing to a relative of his, the Countess till style I'm busier now than ever, particularly since I'm in a good mood for working, I've promised to publish my novel and the Russian Herald. But so far, I've been quite unable to tear myself away from living people in order to devote myself to imaginary ones. And this of course towards the, uh, this is, uh, Christmas of 1874. And he's beginning to write Anna Karenina and Tolstoy again is using a very large, novel, complex, full of characters to draw himself out away from himself to create a fictive realm, which is more powerful and real then his own life. And as he writes his second great novel, it occurs to him increasingly in his letters that all of this is simply a D coy, that he is in fact, verging upon the discovering.
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He begins to record in his letters that in fact, as he writes to a friend in January of 1878, your opinion about Anna seems to me wrong on the contrary, I'm proud of the architecture. The arches have been constructed in such a way that is impossible to see where the Keystone is talking about a literary structure, about a centering on character and event. And that is what I was striving for. Most of all, the structural link is not the plot or the relationships, or even the friendships between the characters, but an inner link. Believe me, this is not unwillingness to accept criticism, especially from you, whose opinion is always too indulgent, but I'm afraid that in skimming through the novel, you didn't notice its inner content. And so he begins to pay attention in his correspondence to the fact that he is now discovering that
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Be nice. All
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Of the characters and all the events, there's an invisible structure, that there was a relationship. And as the 1870s close out, Tolstoy discovers that this structure is a series of focuses that he has been for 15 years trying to divert himself from. And now he's almost possessed by the idea of letting it come forth. What is it that he is thinking of, that he will not let himself become aware of. And as it occurs to him, that he is thinking of nothing of a blank, nothing that life and marriage in writing and all that he could imagine comes to nothing it's all meaningless. And once he has discovered this thought, his mind like a dog worrying about bone will not let it go. And throughout the last year of the 1870s, 1879 Tolstoy realizes that he is in a terrible situation. He has found himself intelligent enough, experienced enough, forthright enough to let occur to him. The thought that he understands quite specific way that life is meaningless and that the emotion national
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Concomitant
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To this thought this discovery is an urge to commit suicide. Any records in his confession written in 1879,
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But not published
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Until 1882. That'd be guns hiding the guns in the house, and he doesn't go hunting anymore. When he goes to sleep at night, he makes sure that there are no courts in the bedroom that could be used as ropes, because there were bear rafters in the bedroom. He begins hiding knives around the house. He discovers that there is a compulsive urge that comes to him again and again, to end his life. And that the very
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Energy behind this urge was it exactly the energy that made him
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A man before. It's his own Mandalay character, wanting him to face up to the fact that if life
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Is meaningless, if all
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Of this is nothing and the thing to do is immediately put an end to it. And so all of the hard one characteristics of manhood that he prized so highly
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Now turn around and become like shark's
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Teeth, trying to devour him the very same energies. So that Tolstoy finds himself in a complete quandary. There is no respite for himself. And so he takes pen in hand thinking to himself. The only
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Out that he has at
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This juncture of impossibility
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Is to write exactly what he is feeling and thinking. So as to spell out that thought and give it a cocoon, give it a large context. And so he writes, he has confession, which is only about 80 pages long and ranks is one of the great spiritual messages of all time. It's one of the great writers of all time laying himself absolutely bare before the Raider. And he wants the reader to understand that he has not got to this impasse in any simplistic way, but that is because of the exacting honesty of the comprehensive living experience of the poignant, uh, honesty of inner experience that because of all of the finances in life, he has arrived at this impasse and that anyone with similar honesty and integrity will also arrive at the same spot that it is only are duping ourselves or hypnotizing ourselves, as he would say to take ourselves away from this discovery that forbids us for, from coming here to this point, what we're going to take a little break and then we'll come back and, uh, we'll go through a little bit of a confession and we'll see what Tolstoy does with it.
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Do you anticipate I'm lecturing on Tuesday night on St. Francis of Assisi that, uh,
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Typically address up here 28, 29 high period, which is just one mile PRN,
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2029 high, just on Griffith park to Hyperion and up about four blocks. And it starts at seven. There'll be some food free food served afterwards. So if you don't get a chance to eat beforehand, why we can outfit. Yeah. Louis Fischer once wrote, when he spent a week with Gandhi in India in 1942, he said that he was surprised at the gaiety of Gandhi's, uh, the ashram in the midst of a war in the midst of all kinds of very strenuous spiritual exercises. There was a kind of a lightheartedness and cheerfulness, and he said, Gandhi and Saint Francis are about the only saints in Western history.
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Okay. I guess sometime we'll do a comic series and I could show you another side. Mm. And I don't mean a lecture on great women. I mean, a real comics Tolstoy got the bit between his teeth and could not let go. So in a confession, and we're just entitled confession. If you lie in recalling his years as a world, famous novelists, he writes, I cannot recall those years without har loving and heartrending Hey, you said, I wrote out of vanity self-interest in pride. We did the same thing in my writing that I did in my life in order to acquire the fame and the money I was writing for, it was necessary to conceal what was good and to flop what was bad. And that is what I did time and time again, I would scheme in my writings to conceal under the mask of indifference and even pleasantry those yearnings for something good, which gave meaning to my life.
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And I succeeded in this and was praised. He said that these years were like an insanity to hear that finally he writes. And so I lived, but five years ago, something very strange began to happen to me, that would have been 1874. At first, I began having moments of bewilderment when my life would come to a halt is if I did not know how to live or what to do, I would lose my presence of mind and fall into a state of depression. But this past I continued to live as before, but then the moments would be wilderness would come again more frequently lasting longer. Whenever my life came to a halt, the question would arise. Y Y yeah. Why anything? Why all this, what next? At first, I thought these were pointless and irrelevant questions. Well, I thought that the answers to them were well-known and that if I should ever want to resolve them, it would not be too hard for me.
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It was just that I could not be bothered with it right now, but I should take it upon myself sometime. And I would find the answers, but the questions began to come up more and more frequently. And their demands to be answered, became more and more urgent and like points finally concentrated upon one spot. These questions without answers came together to form a single black stain. My life came to a stop. I could not breathe, eat, drink, sleep, indeed. I could not help, but breathe, eat, drink, and sleep. But there was no life in me anymore.
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I had no desire for satisfactions and any accounts if it occurred to me that I might want something that immediately occurred to me, that it didn't matter if a fairy had come and offered to fill, fill my every wish I would not have known what to wish. He said that his spiritual condition began to occur to him and sort of a mocking awareness. That life was a very stupid, cruel joke. And that some presence somewhere was having a very good laugh on his account, but he didn't even have a sense of irony anymore. So he writes about a third of the way through a confession. Finally, it began to occur to me. Can it be that I have overlooked something?
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Have I inadvertently got into this position? Have I, have I led myself to this kind of an impasse through making something up or leaving something out? Have I been trying to tell myself something very important? And, uh, I haven't been paying attention. So he says he begins to go back over his life, the fine tooth comb, going back over the events, especially of the last five years from the middle of the 1870s. And he realizes, yes, he's done all these things. He's written one of the great European novels. He just finished it. It's just running a cereal. And just now is coming out in book form. And he notes peculiarly that he's physically healthy. He says I'm, uh, able to do almost any kind of physical work. So it's nothing physically manifesting. It's obviously not something with language. He can do language better than almost anyone, but have I left something out? He writes, maybe I have failed to understand, is it not possible that this state of despair then is perhaps common to everyone?
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Maybe it's just a phase that men go through, but no, it occurs to him more poignantly. It's something particularly for himself has emerged and he can't let it go. He begins using phrases like this. You are a little lump of something randomly stuck together. The lump decomposes, the decomposition of this lump is known as your life, the lump falls apart. And thus the decomposition ends as do all your questions. He begins going back over the most poignant reading that he's ever done. And in fact, he then lists for teachers, Schopenhauer, Socrates, Solomon, and the Buddha, and he puts them together. And he says, these represent the crane of intellectual understanding of life. And he goes through them one by one Schopenhauer who had influenced him enormously. He writes, if we accept the inner essence of the universe, his will says Schopenhauer. And if we accept the objectivity of this will in all phenomenon from the unconscious surges of the dark forces of nature, to the fully conscious activity of man, we cannot avoid the conclusion that all these phenomena disappear in a free denial and self annihilation of will.
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And he goes on to quote that all of it ends in a nothing, therefore upon the complete annihilation of the will. All that remains for us who are fulfilled by that, well is of course nothing. But on the other hand for the all, for those in whom the will has been and renounced this universe of ours, which is so real with all its sons and galaxies is itself nothingness. And then he goes to Solomon, the vanities, he goes to Socrates and he goes to the Buddha and the confession comes to the truth, or it's part. I say, my position was terrible. I knew that I could find nothing in the way of rational knowledge, except on ultimate denial.
(00:56:59):
Yeah. In faith, I could find nothing except a denial of reason. And this was even more impossible than a denial of life. According to rational knowledge, it followed that life is evil and people know it. They do not have to live yet. They have lived and they do live just as I myself have lived, even though I have known for a long time, that life is meaningless and evil. According to faith, that followed that in order to understand the meaning of life, I would have to turn away from reason the very thing for which meaning was necessary. So in the confession, he brings himself around the fact that all of this consistent nothingness to the meaning of life has led him to either an impasse or he must reject reason and rationality as a basis, it's just upon which to assess himself. And he does this, that, just that. So he turns himself over in a con in his confession to faith. He says, all right, what is bothering me is your rational. It isn't in the rational order.
(00:58:20):
It cannot manifest itself in the rational order because every time I bring my mind, hone it to understanding, go in and depth and think it through. I keep coming out with the same equation, zero equals zero. I keep coming back again to this fundamental talk to logical nihilism, that there's something in the very guts of the universe. In me, not my mind cannot think out and gets frozen into this talk to logical or equation. Zero equals zero. So rational knowledge he writes has led me to the conclusion that life is meaningless. My life came to a halt and I wanted to do away with myself. As I looked around at people, I saw they were living and I was convinced that they knew the meaning of life. They, the peasants, they know he goes through all the arguments of them not being educated. He's supposed to be educated. He's supposed to know, but his knowing when it's really home leads him to zero equals zero an impasse, but the people are dealing with something else in their irrational faith. They are just living life.
(00:59:55):
He'll
(00:59:55):
Later in a correspondence. In fact, in his diary, he'll use the expression X over infinity, that there's no equation in understanding the mystery of life, but there's an expression for it. The unknown over infinity, that it's not an equation. That life is not a logical construct. It simply is a unity, just like it occurs. And it occurs in its fullness. The mind can't understand it. All the mind wants to understand it we'll go to any lengths. We'll invent fictions, logics histories, religions to approach it. And so he finally comes to his understanding the life of our class at the wealthy and the learning was not only repulsive to me, but it had permanently lost all of its meaning to some of our action and thinking of our science and art. All of it struck me as the overindulgent answers of a spoiled child. I realized that meaning was not to be sought here. The actions of the laboring people of those who create life began to appear to me as the only true way I realized that the meaning provided by this life was truth. And I embraced it that whatever that life presented, whatever in gender, that, that became truth for him until we began seeing at this time, portraits of Tolstoy, beginning to wear the costume.
(01:01:50):
In fact, all during the 1880s, increasingly Tolstoy began donning the peasant garb, the famous portrait. So by repping of him behind a plow twice, he walked from Moscow all the way to, he has an AI Pollyanna in the neighboring province of Tula with a long staff and they, uh, peasants a turbine, uh, hat. So the raccoon skin, hat of the Russian peasant and the long, uh, drab, rough, uh, burlap like, uh, capes and togas. And we see in the eyes of the man, the life. But we see in the face, the stunned shame of a man who has seen that all of the constructs upon which his men had was based upon which his mind had been rared upon, which his character had been formed were in fact, the barriers which had kept him from himself all the while. And so he went to school instead of teaching the peasant children.
(01:03:01):
He began to learn from the peasants and from the teacher of the 1850s, he became the student of the 1880s of what we would call the common man of the serfs and the peasants. He began to learn from them. And in this, he realized that they had a timeline to spirituality, which was not clouded by any church structure. And so it began to gall Tolstoy that the largest unit of rational ordering that Western history had to offer was the Christian Church. And it was exactly the Christian Church rather than the experience, which Christianity was based upon the experience of a man 1800 years beforehand. And that it was the experience of that individual that was poignant and timeless and was redone when someone was pointed in timeless, in their own cells. And that all of the church structures, just like the mine were a complicated filigree, a shadow play to keep man away. In fact, he wrote after a confession,
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A very
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Poignant book, which was refused to be published, which was a criticism of dogmatic theology. Then in fact, uh, many of Tolstoy's books for the next 20 years were refused publication here would get them published in Geneva or surreptitiously, run a few copies off.
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And finally,
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The turn of the 20th century, he would be excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox church. He wrote in what is to be done. The church existed in her purity, as long as her teachers endured patiently and suffered. But as soon as they became fat and sleek, their teaching activity ended formerly say, the people priests were a golden chalices of wood. Now chalices are golden priests of what
(01:05:24):
[inaudible]
(01:05:27):
Charles do. I began to take upon himself in a concession standpoint, which would become the basis for the rest of his life. Live seeking God for there can be no life without God and more powerfully than ever a light shown within me and all around me. And this light has not abandoned me since. How does he come to that? He tells us specifically, I remember one day in early spring when I was alone in the forest, listening to the sounds of the woods, I listened and thought that about the one thing that had constantly occupied me for the last three years uninterrupted. I was in the act of searching for God very well. I said to myself, so there is no God like the one I have imagined very well. The only reality is my life. There is no such God and nothing, no miracle of any kind can prove there is because miracles exist only in my irrational imagination. But then where does my notion of God come from? Well, the one who I am seeking, where does that come from? I asked myself, and again, with first thought, there arose in me, joyous waves of life. Everything around me came to life full of meaning in that moment he's talking about. And then as time would go on 15 minutes to half an hour, it would be back thinking. And he would notice that the joy of life was gone.
(01:07:18):
So he would redirect himself and commit himself again to that discovery about life. And the waves of joy would reoccurring and began to understand that there was a language of the spirit who language. At that point, I took a closer look at myself and that what had been happening within me. And I remember the hundreds of times that I had gone through deaths and revivals. I remembered that I had lived only in those moments when I believed in God, then is now I said to myself, as long as I know God, I live. When I forget, when I do not live in him, I die. He purified himself to be able to record this experiential continuum. Everything else was extreme. There was only, and only that single minded recording of the way in which the switch goes on and off within ourselves dependent, not upon an idea, but on the quality of belief, I did not have some vague hope of finding Cod.
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I truly live only when I am conscious of him and seek him. He doesn't need to have an image only when he is sincerely seeking. And when he is conscious of that fact of that process does life then suddenly light up and give him a meaning that he doesn't need an equation. He doesn't need an image. He doesn't need an answer. He needs only to be conscious. All the process of integrity, it just searching. And that alone was sufficient. That alone. What then do I seek a voice? Cried out within me? He is there the one without whom there could be no life to know God and to live, come to one. And the same thing, God is life lives seeking God for there can be no life without God and more powerfully than ever a light shown within me and all around me. And this light has not abandoned me since.
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So that for Tolstoy, there was no longer any answers. There was no intellectual structure to be mastered, to be analyzed, to be synthesized. There was simply the integrity as a man to be conscious that he was searching for the ultimate for the divine and that as long as he held that attitude of integrity within himself and pursued it as best he could in his life, there was meaningfulness. As soon as he forgot it, everything blanked out. And there was nothing, nothing meant anything at all, zero equals zero. But as long as he kept the relational manifestation, the unknown over infinity in mind, he was able to continue. And so for 30 years after that Tolstoy poured himself out, there are critics who say that he sacrificed the world's greatest literary talent to writing a bunch of, um, religious diatribes, not so they catalog of his religious works in those 30 years is an exquisite revelation of a Western mind in possession of all of the great faculties that we would pride ourselves upon language insight, self honesty, uh, tremendous scope, uh, awareness of large historical structures, the penetration of ideas and characters,
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And seeing that
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All of that exists within and that life flows in through that mind and altogether, and carries with it, with it, that quality of realization that we would call meaning occasionally in those last 30 years, Tolstoy, what write stories to be beacons for those who came after one of the great short stories of that period came out in 1886, the death of Ivan. Elledge an old judge who on his death bed realizes that he has had a shrinking act, uh, due to his illness. He will never leave his house again. And a little later on, he realizes he'll never leave his bedroom again. And he realizes that the physical world is shrinking for him. That has finally come to that moment of truth. And then he realizes he will never leave this bed. The whole world, which was available to him is shrunk to his own bed.
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And finally his body, which is unable to move very comfortably. And then all the self-pity comes out of the old judge and he doesn't want to die. He doesn't want to go deaf looms to him like some black hole into which he's going to fall and be swallowed in the midst of this self pity. A little grand nephew comes into the room and brings his great-grandfather a drink of water and tens him and the old man is beginning to cry. Tears of pity that the little boy in his ignorance is caring for him. Does it know that life ends in a blankness? And at the moment of thinking of the little boy of seeing him, everything lights up, everything becomes real. He stops quivering the har evaporates it's gone and he realizes he can't die. What is their account to die? These stories are spectacular in the larger novels.
(01:14:04):
I think I selected for you a passage from Hogene moron to just show you the grand writing quality of total story. Remember this is in translation, huh? Murat had been one of the mountain bandits fighting with that. A great bandit hero Shamir who had held off the Russian army for a long time decades, uh, tremendous, uh, uh, uh, massive faced individual with bandoliers and, uh, for turbines and always was able to beat the Russians and how Jay Mariah had gone over to the Russians had betrayed and was one of their Scouts. And near the end of the novel, he realizes that all his family are there and his son is there and he wants to see his son again. And he's no longer concerned about whether he lives or dies. He wants to go back and be there with his son. So he decides to leave.
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And this is the, this is the night pass passage that he gave up Haji, Mariah, who was a Muslim halfway through the night. He had made up his mind. He decided that he must flee to the mountains and with the AVRs, who were loyal to him, forced his way into the Dino and either free his family or die in the attempt whether or not to bring his family back to the Russians or to flee to cousin with them and fight Shamiel. He did not decide. He knew only that he must now get away from the Russians and into the mountains. And it began at once to put this decision into effect. He took his black quilted jacket from beneath the cushion and went to his nucleus corners. They lived across the hall. And as soon as he stepped out into the hall, the door of which was open, he was enveloped by the dewy freshness of the moonlit night.
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And his ears were filled by the whistling and war bling of Nightingale's in the garden by the house. How'd you Morocco across the hall, opened the door of his new care's room. There was no light in the room, only the new moon in its first Porter shining through the windows, a table. And two chairs stood to the side and all for a new curse lay on rugs and cloaks spread on the floor. 10 Nephi was sleeping outside with the horses Gonzalo hearing. The dark Creek raised himself, looked round and seeing it was Haji Murat, lay down again, elder, however who lay next to him, sprang up and began to put on his jacket, expecting some command. And he takes out gold coins. And he says, so these into my jacket, the sign to the mountain, people that we are permanently going. So the money and the clothes, and a little later on the Russian have pursued them and have tracked them.
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And how Jane Gerrard knows that they're all going to die by way of replied. It was a puff of smoke from the ditch, the crack of a rifle and a portlet struck the horse of one of the militia men, which shied and fell after this. There was a rattle of fire from the rifles of the militia positioned on the edge of the bushes. There are bullets, whistled and hummed clipping the branches in laves and landing in the Rampart. But none of them hit the men from behind. All they hit was Gonzalo's Horace, which had straight off, it was wounded in the head, but did not fall snapping its hobble. It crashed through the bushes to the other horses, Nestle against them in Splunk, spilling its blood on the young grass. How'd Jake maraud and his men only fired when one of the militia men showed himself and they seldom missed three militia.
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Men were wounded and their comrades not only hesitated to charge Hodjat Mirage and his men, but drop further and further back firing only random shots at long range. This went on we're over an hour. Then they rallied themselves. And sh there's a charge with swords and guns and the end of his wounded, the enemy whooping and screeching as they ran from Bush to Bush, did he nearer and never how Jake Todd was hit by another bullet in the left side, he laid down in the ditch and plugged the wound with another piece of wadding from his jacket. The wound in his side was mortal and he felt that he was dying one after another images and memories flashed through his mind. Now he saw the mighty walnuts. Arc-on clasping his face, his severed hanging cheek, rushing at his enemies with dagger drawn. You saw [inaudible] old feeble pale and his sly white face and hurt his soft voice.
(01:19:12):
He saw last his son, you said, yeah, with his wife and then pale face red beard and screwed up eyes of his enemy. Shamiel and these memories running through his mind. He vote no feelings in here. No pity ill will or desire of any kind of, it all seems to insignificant compared to what was now beginning and what had already begun for him. But as powerful body, meanwhile continued what it had started to do something. The last remnants of his strength. He lifted himself above the Rampart and fired his pistol at a man running towards you. You hit him and the man fell. Then he crawled completely under the ditch with his dagger drawn and limping badly went straight at the enemy. Several shots rang out. He staggered, it fell a number of militia. Men rushed with a triumphant yell towards his fallen body. But what they suppose was a dead body suddenly stirred first, his blood stained shaven head it's pep Luca Dawn, that his body will lifted. Then holding onto a tray Hodgett Mirage pulled himself fully up. This incidentally is the ancient birth position. Giving birth hanging onto a limb of a tree is giving birth to Israel self to plead the world, then holding onto a tree how'd you moron pulled himself fully out. He looked so terrifying that the advancing men stopped dead, but suddenly he gave a shutter staggered from the tree and like a side fissile fell full length in his face. And moved no more
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Early in the
(01:21:00):
Novel Hodgett Mirage and pride of his manhood showing the incredible accuracy with which he could ride at full speed and snatch a single thistle on the dead run of his horse is a sign of his great prowess. As a warrior. Tolstoy story wrote this in 1904. He was nearing 80 years of age, but the difficulty for him, again and again,
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The body,
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The physical body, he writes the last year of his life just a month before he died. October 9th, 1910. My health is better when walking and had good thoughts in the morning, but the body, why the body, why space, time causality. But the very question. Why is there a question about causality and the mystery of why we have a body remains a mystery? We must ask not why I live, but what I should do. I shall write nothing more. I wrote nothing except some worthless letter and he goes on and then his letters began to record two separate directions. One is a growing antagonism of his wife coming in and disturbing him coming in to see if he's all right. And of course he isn't all right, he's all he's done. He's sick. He says, he writes, I am physically very weight. The same as ever. There was a letter on the desk from Sophia Andre of now with accusations and an invitation to repudiate something.
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When she came in, I asked her to leave me in peace and she left. I have an oppressive feeling in my chest and my pulse was over 90. Again, revised his little essay on socialism and he writes a worthless occupation before going out. I went see Sophia Andrea now and told her that my advice to her as to leave me in peace. The next day he writes, got up early thought about space and matter. I shall write it later, went for a walk letters in my booklet on sexual desire. I do not like it went riding with duration conversations in the evening, not too boring. I'm going to sleep. Then on October 19, he records Sophia and Draven came in during the night. Another conspiracy against me. What are you talking about? What conspiracy? She's saying this to him and he's recording you. Your diary was given to church Goff.
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It's not here. Sasha has it all this very painful. I could not go to sleep for a long time because I could not overcome the unkind feeling pain in my liver. The conception of the world as material and time and space has nothing that is actually real about it, but it is only our conception. This is so because this conception is internally self-contradictory matter, cannot be understood except within the limited confines of space. Whereas space is infinite, unlimited everything in order to be a thing, must be limited in some way, limited by some other thing, the earth by the air particles of air, bike, gases, gases by thinner gases. And these exactly the same as true of time. Time defines the duration of occurrences. Whereas time itself is infinite and therefore every attribute as to its infinitude has no significance. The life of a micro organism is less prolonged than the life of a man and the life of a man.
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Then the life of a planet and the life of a planet then, so that all measures of prolongation have only a relative meaning there are only X over infinity and therefore are all equal to each other. Whatever X may be to live in God's sight does not mean to live in the sight of some God in heaven, but it means to evoke the God who is within you and live in his sight. And then a week later there's a break. He can't take it any longer. The interruptions and he flees his own house. The old man accompanied by one of his daughters, fleas in the middle of the night, he had many times in his life gone off to monasteries for a meditation retreat. This time he was leaving permanently. He got as far as a little train community and their everything broke down. His temperature went up and he was trapped.
(01:26:15):
And there at Aster Bova told us, do I lay L for about a week word, of course, spread throughout the world. And individuals were rushing to the site and they kept his wife away. They would only have allowed her to come in. If he had asked for her, he never asked for her at the end, he, this is Elmer mods, great biography of Tolstoy. Most of it was written while Tosta was alive and Tolstoy corrected everything. And it was published in September of 1910, and then he died two months later. So the revised version came out at 1911, just adding this towards midnight on Saturday, he was worse. And then his delirium, he repeatedly explained to escape to escape. Large injection of morphine was administered. His breathing fell from 60 to 36 a minute. His pro pulse grew weaker and weaker. And 4:00 AM it'd become almost indistinguishable.
(01:27:26):
And an injection of salt solution had no longer any apparent effect artificial respiration was resorted to. And you can see from this and understanding the man that all of this was clouding, his physical self morphine saw artificial respiration. He was trying to maintain an inner yoga focus. Whereas the Christian yoga finally, Sunday, September, November 7th, the great man died calmly and painlessly about six o'clock and his body was then taken by train back to Yasmina Pollyanna. And he was buried on the grounds there now 15 years ago, when you have to Shanko was in San Francisco, he talked about having gone on the pilgrimage
(01:28:26):
One time as a younger
(01:28:28):
Poet man with some younger friends. So he asked me a Pollyanna and he said that as they walked down the lane, the approaching this state, these gnarled old trees that were there, the Tolstoy had planted. He said they stopped when they suddenly realized that he wasn't in his coffin. He wasn't in his tune, that he was in those neural trees all over the estate. And that having seen that, I realized that he was in all the trees of the land that he had returned himself back to the people in the most primordial way a person could, he'd given his spirit back to the land and you have to shank. Her said that that insight allowed him finally to become a poet, to realize that there was a tradition that it wasn't the stall on the structure that had been imposed upon them, but that there had been a great man who had left his spirit in the land. And it was still there and could be found
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At any time by anyone, if they looked in the right way.
(01:29:42):
Well, we'll have to come back to Tolstoy next year. [inaudible].

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