March 21st. Last week I went for a day to Yasnaya Polyana. I found Tolstoi well and cheerful.
Tolstoi is always much interested in the question of man’s spiritual state during sleep.
He told me this time:
“In a dream one cries, or is happy or excited, and, when one wakes up and remembers the dream, one does not understand what made one cry or be happy or excited. I explain it to myself in this way: Apart from the happiness, excitement, or bitterness which are caused by definite events, there are also states of happiness, excitement, ecstasy, and grief. In such states an insignificant event is often sufficient to throw us into ecstasy, excitement, etc. In a dream, when one’s consciousness does not act so consistently and logically, this state is expressed by the corresponding sensation which has often no external cause. For instance, in a dream one often feels utterly ashamed, and when one wakes up and sees that one’s trousers are quietly hanging over a chair, one feels an extraordinary joy. That is why I so much love ‘Popov’s Dream.’[2] It gives a wonderful account of that sensation of shame in a dream, and, besides, all the characters are magnificently described. In spite of its comic nature, it is a real work of art.”
June 1st. I returned from Yasnaya Polyana, where I spent a day. Tolstoi is planning a work of a philosophical nature, which he is greatly excited about at present. Speaking of it, Tolstoi said to me:
“Everything in the world is alive. Everything that seems to us dead seems so only because it is either too large or, on the contrary, too small. We do not see microbes, and heavenly bodies seem dead to us, for the same reason that we seem dead to an ant. The earth is undoubtedly alive, and a stone on the earth is the same as a nail on a finger. The materialists make matter the basis of life. All these theories of the origin of species, of protoplasm, of atoms, are all of value in so far as they help us to know the laws governing the visible world. But it must not be forgotten that all these, including ether, are working hypotheses, and nothing else. Astronomers in their calculations assume that the earth is a motionless body, and only afterwards correct the mistake. Materialists too make false premises, but they do not observe the fact that this is so, but let them pass as basic truths.
“True life exists where the living being is conscious of itself as an indivisible ‘I,’ in whom all impressions, feelings, etc., become one. So long as the ‘I’ struggles, as nearly the whole animal world does, merely to crush the other creatures known to him, in order to attain his own temporary advantage, true spiritual life which is without time and space remains unexpressed and imprisoned. True spiritual life is liberated when a man neither rejoices in his own happiness, nor suffers from his own suffering, but suffers and rejoices with the worries and pleasures of others and is fused with them into a common life.
“Of the life to come, although of course the words ‘to come’ are inappropriate here, of life beyond our physical being, it is impossible to have knowledge. We can imagine two forms only: either a new form of the individual life, or a fusion of personal life in the life of the whole. The former seems to us more comprehensible and more likely, since we only know our individual life and we can more easily accept the idea of the same life in a different form.”
July 14th. In the beginning of July my wife and I spent two days in Yasnaya Polyana.
On the occasion of Mme. Kolokoltsev’s[3] suicide Tolstoi said to me: “I can’t understand why people look upon suicide as a crime. It seems to me to be man’s right. It gives a man the chance of dying when he no longer wishes to live. The Stoics thought like that.”