[Tolstoy:] "And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was being played upon me by someone. One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.
"The oriental fable of the traveler surprised in the desert by a wild beast is very old.
"Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate; but still he clings, and sees two mice, one white, the other black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, gnawing off its roots.
"The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish; but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue and licks them off with rapture.
"Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer, and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the branch to which I cling. I can see but one thing: the inevitable dragon and the mice ñ I cannot turn my gaze away from them.
"This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which every one may understand. What will be the outcome of what I do to-day? Of what I shall do to-morrow? What will be the outcome of all my life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?
"These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I experienced, for life to go on.
"I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to . . . . an invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It was a force like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction.
"Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope in order not to hang myself to the rafters . . . . behold me no longer going shooting, lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end to myself with my gun."
[Henry James:] As he continues, he finds only four ways in which men are accustomed to meet the situation. Either mere animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing the dragon or the mice, --"and from such a way,"he says,"I can learn nothing, after what I now know;"or reflective epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts, -- which is only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first; or manly suicide; or seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintively clinging to the bush of life. Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect.
To this way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakable blind and shallow.
Any lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself!
Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Canceled as it all is by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance.
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