A thousand times I say to myself: 'Let the dead bury their dead.' One must make some use of the strength which remains to one, but one cannot persuade a stone to fall upwards instead of downwards whither it is drawn. One cannot laugh at a joke one is weary of. One cannot eat when one does not want to. And what is life all for, when to-morrow the torments of death will begin, with all the abomination of falsehood and self-deception, and will end in annihilation for oneself? An amusing thing! Be useful, be beneficent, be happy while life lasts,--say people to one another; but you, and happiness, and virtue, and utility, consist of truth. And the truth I have learned in thirty-two years is, that the position in which we are placed is terrible. 'Take life as it is; you have put yourselves in that position.' How! I take life as it is. As soon as man reaches the highest degree of development, he sees clearly that it is all nonsense and deception, and that the truth--which he still loves better than all else--is terrible. That when you look at it well and clearly, you wake with a start and say with terror, as my brother did: 'What is that?' Of course, so long as the desire to know and speak the truth lasts, one tries to know and speak. That alone remains to me of the moral world; higher than that I cannot place myself. That alone I will do, but not in the form of your art. Art is a lie, and I can no longer love a beautiful lie. I shall remain here for the winter because I am here, and it is all the same where one lives. Please write to me. I love you as my brother loved you, and he remembered you to his last moment. A month later we find him writing in a different state of mind: A boy of thirteen has died in torment from consumption. What for? The only explanation is given by faith in the compensation of a future life. If that does not exist, there is no justice, and justice is vain, and the demand for justice--a superstition. Justice forms the most essential demand of man to man. And man looks for the same in his relation to the universe. Without a future life it is lacking. Expediency is the sole, the unalterable law of Nature, say the naturalists. But in the best manifestations of man's soul: love and poetry--it is absent. This has all existed and has died--often without expressing itself. Nature, if her one law be expediency, far o'erstepped her aim when she gave man the need of poetry and love. Nearly twenty years later, in his _Confession_, Tolstoy referred to his brother's death in the words: