“Why in a community? One ought not to separate oneself from other people. If there is anything good in a man, let that light be spread about him wherever he lives. What numbers of people settled in communities, yet nothing came of it! All their energies went at first into external arrangement of life, and when at length they settled down, there began to be quarrels and gossip, and it all fell to pieces.... You are grumbling at the Institute, yet there is the porter there whom you could treat kindly, like a human being, and then you would have done a good act. And the girls, your pupils? Can’t you make a great deal that is good out of those relations? One can always shut oneself off from people, but nothing good will come of it. I say this not because I want to justify my own life. I live in the wrong way and know it is the wrong way, but I have always wanted and tried to live better, only I could not.... I shall go to God in the consciousness that I did what I could to make my life better. “One should never attempt to arrange life beforehand. At times I ask myself what I should do if I remained here alone? For instance, I should say to Ilya Vasilevich: ‘It would be nice if you did the rooms and tidied them to-day, and I will do them to-morrow.’ Then we should eat together. And so on with one thing after another, as things would arrange themselves. Only it has to be remembered that the ideal of the material life cannot be fully realized, any more than the ideal of the spiritual life. The whole point is in the constant effort to approach the ideal. If I gave up everything now and went away, Sophie Andreevna would hate me, and the evil of that would perhaps be worse. You have your father ... and so it is with every one.” Tolstoi said before this: “I said to Sophie Andreevna to-day, and I believe she was hurt by it: the first concern in life must be for the things of the soul, and, if household duties interfere with that, then damn household duties.” Last night we sat on the balcony. Tolstoi said that he had had a nice letter from a simple man who had read several of his books, and who asked, at the end of his letter, where there were people who live a Christian life, for he would leave everything and go and live with them. Tolstoi said that he replied to him much in the same way as he had done to Klechkovsky. Tolstoi added: “I think that even if one was a woman in a brothel, or a gaoler, one ought not suddenly to give up one’s work. Certainly any one who realizes the evil of such a life will not go on with it, but the important thing is not the external change.”