Archer was here yesterday, arriving from Chertkov--I liked him.[365]
There is much to do, but I am all absorbed in _Resurrection_, being
sparing with the water and using it only for _Resurrection_. It
seems to me it won’t be bad. People praise it, but I don’t believe.
Everything that I noted--it was all very important--I will write
out later, but now I want to write that which I just now, walking
on the path, in the evening, not only thought but felt clearly:
1) Under my feet there is the frozen, hard earth; around, enormous
trees; overhead a cloudy sky; I fed my body, I feel pain in the
head; I am occupied with thoughts on _Resurrection_; and yet I
know, I feel in all my being, that both the firm and frozen earth
and the trees and the sky and my body and my thoughts--all this is
only a product of my five senses, my image, the world, made by me
because such is my partition from the world. And that it will be
sufficient for me to die--and all this will not disappear but will
become transformed, as they make transformations in the theatres:
from bushes and stones, they make castles, towers, etc. Death is
nothing else than such a transformation, dependent from another
partition from the world, another personality: Here I consider as
myself, my body with my senses, and then something else will detach
itself to be myself. And then the whole world will become something
else. But the world is such and not something else, only because I
consider myself as this and not as something else. But there can
be an innumerable quantity of divisions of the world. (This is not
entirely clear for others, but for me--very.)[366]
_Nov. 3. If I live._
_Nov. 14. Y. P._
Again I have not noticed how 11 days have passed. Have been very
intensely occupied with _Resurrection_ and am making good progress.
Am absolutely near the end. Serezha and Suller were here and both
went away to the Caucasus with my letter to Golitsin.[367] S. arrived
yesterday. Very well. It is a long time since I have felt so well
and keen, intellectually and physically.
I cannot make out what I have written out and what I haven’t.[368]
1) How difficult it is to please people! In order to please them it
is necessary that the past and the future meet their demands. But
in order to please God, one has only to satisfy His demands in the
present.
2) To live for others seems difficult--just as to work seems
difficult. But just as in work, in the care for others there may be
the best reward: love of others may and may not be; while in labour
there is an inner reward, you work to the end, get tired, and you
feel good.
3) The poetry of the past occupied itself only with the strong of
the world: with the Czars, etc., because the strong of the world
appeared as the highest and the most complete representatives of
the people. But if you take the plain people, then it is necessary
that they express general phenomena ... (Unclear.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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