Shortly before he attained his fiftieth year, Tolstoi became bitterly tormented by the thought of death. He describes the beginning of this mental crisis in the following words: “First there came moments of perplexity, of arrest of vital force, as though I had lost the power of living and moving; I felt utterly lost, and fell into a state of complete dejection. This passed away, however, and I continued to live on as before. Before long the moments of perplexity became more frequent; the arrest of my living energies was always manifested by a renewal of the same questions, ‘Why? and What comes after?’”[140] For some time Tolstoi did not pay much attention to his mental condition, but by degrees he began to analyse it, and reached the following conclusion: “The fact is that life is a blind alley. I had lived, worked and marched onward, and had arrived at the edge of an abyss, and nothing remained to me but to fall into it. And yet I could neither stop nor retrace my footsteps, nor shut my eyes in order not to see suffering and inevitable death. It was a void, a complete annihilation.”[141] “In this condition I felt that I must cease to live, and, fearing death, I had to employ various ruses to prevent myself from taking my life.”[142] “I could attach no reasonable meaning to any action of my life. I was merely astonished to think I had failed to realise the position from the beginning. All that, I said to myself, must have been patent to all the world long ago. If not to-day, then to-morrow, disease and death—they are already here—will attack elderly persons—me—and there will remain only corruption and worms. My deeds, whatever they may be, will be forgotten sooner or later, and I shall be no more. Why then take pains about anything? How a man can know all this and yet go on living amazes me. One can only go on living just so long as one is intoxicated with life; once sober, however, one cannot fail to see what an idiotic fraud it all is. It is also true that there is nothing even amusing or intelligent about it; it is simply stupid and cruel and nothing more.” Seeing no way out of this, Tolstoi turned his reflections on family love: “My family ... I say to myself ... but then my family, my wife, and children are also merely human beings! They live under the same conditions as I myself. They have the choice between living a lie or facing the horrible truth. Why then should they live at all? Why should I love, cherish, and protect them? In order that they may experience the same despair, or that they may go through life like idiots? Loving them, I cannot conceal the truth from them; every step forward in knowledge leads to this truth; and the truth is death.”[143] To conclude this series of quotations, which must have given the reader some idea of the love of life and the fear of death, I shall give one more example, taken, not from the pen of a master but from daily life.[144] It refers