7) To pray? They say that prayer is necessary, that it is necessary to have the sweet feeling of prayer which is called forth by service, singing, reading, exclamations, ikons. But what is prayer? A communion with God, a recognition of one’s relation to God, the highest state of the soul. Is it possible that this state of the soul can be attained by an action upon the outer senses.... Is it not more probable that the prayerful state might be reached only in rare exceptional moments and necessarily in isolation, as even Christ said and as Elijah saw God, not in a storm but in a tender breeze? 8) Yesterday I looked through the romances, novels, and poems of Fet.[114] I recalled our incessant music on 4 grand-pianos in Yasnaya Polyana and it became clear to me that all this--the romances, the poems, the music--was not art, something important and necessary to people in general, but a self-indulgence of robbers, parasites, who have nothing in common with life; romances, novels about how one falls in love disgustingly, poetry about this or about how one languishes from boredom. And music about the same theme. But life, all life, seethes with its own problems of food, distribution, labour, about faith, about the relations of men ... It is shameful, nasty. Help me, Father, to serve Thee by showing up this lie. 9) I was going from the Chertkovs on the 5th of July. It was evening, and beauty, happiness, blessedness, lay on everything. But in the world of men? There was greed, malice, envy, cruelty, lust, debauchery. When will it be among men as it is in Nature? Here there is a struggle, but it is honest, simple, beautiful. But there it is base. I know it and I hate it, because I myself am a man. (I have not succeeded.) 10) When I suffered in my soul, I tried to calm myself with the consciousness of serving. And that used to calm me, but only then when there happened to be an obvious instance of serving, i. e. when it was unquestionably required and I was drawn to it. But what is to be done when it happens neither one way nor the other? Give myself to God, negate myself. Do as Thou wilt, I consent. (Again, not what I want to say.) I am going to dinner. 11) Kant,[115] they tell us, made a revolution in the thought of men. He was the first to show that a thing in itself is inaccessible to knowledge, that the source of knowledge and life is spiritual. But is not that the same which Christ said two thousand years ago, only in a way understandable to men? Bow in spirit and in truth; the spirit is life creating, the letter, the flesh, is beneficial in no way. 12) Balls, feasts, spectacles, parades, pleasure-gardens, etc., are a dreadful tool in the hands of the organisers. They can have a terrible influence. And if anything has to be subjected to control, it is this.