At one time, he was occupied especially with the problem of the
philosophic definition of time and space and he wrote down his
thoughts on this theme quite often. At another time, he was interested
in the problem of error, of whether the outer world was such as it
appeared. Quite often he noted his thoughts on the themes: On God,
on the meaning of life, on the difference between the spiritual and
the animal life, on reason, on prayer. Quite often, at this time,
thoughts came to him about the given work of God, about service
to God, about love in general and about love towards enemies in
particular.
Besides this, there are scattered in the whole Journal for the four
mentioned years, various thoughts on the sex-problem--on falling in
love, on women, on marriage--and also quite a number of thoughts on
illness, on death, on the unjust life of the rich, on memory and on
many other subjects. Sometimes one finds thoughts in the Journal
which appear in connection with the books that he was reading; for
instance, there are several thoughts called forth by the reading of
the philosophic works of Schopenhauer and Spier. The fact that there
are few notes in the Journal about the books that had been read or
were being read is, of course, no sign that Tolstoi read little. It
is sufficient to open his book, _What Is Art_, to convince oneself
as to the enormous amount of books that were read and studied by
Tolstoi on the one theme of art alone for this work; nevertheless,
there are very few of them mentioned in the Journal.
V
SOME FEATURES FROM THE SPIRITUAL DOMAIN OF TOLSTOI’S LIFE[a6]
In due time, when absolutely all Tolstoi’s Journals and letters
and all his writings which have not yet appeared will be printed,
and also when all the unused material about him, that literary
inheritance in all its enormous volume, will be made use of, then
it will be possible to carefully study the great process of the
_growth of Tolstoi’s soul_. At the present moment, when a great
number of Tolstoi’s writings and the reminiscences about him are not
yet published, it is impossible to really penetrate the whole depth
and breadth of Tolstoi’s spirit. At present, it is only possible
to throw light on the general characteristics of several separate
sides of his inner life, in one or several of its periods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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