“Very well, if what you believe in satisfies you; and this must never be condemned, only you must not prevent people from believing what their conscience prompts them to, and you must not try to make them believe differently, as all the Churches do, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Orthodox, the Buddhist, the Muhammadan.”...
Towards the end of July, Klechkovsky came to Yasnaya and played.
Tolstoi lay on the sofa, and, after Klechkovsky had finished playing, we sat by Tolstoi. Klechkovsky began talking about himself, how dissatisfied he was with his life, how he would like to live on the land, to give up his music teaching and the Institute. But he can’t do it because his father would be much upset by such a sudden change in his life. He also said that he would like to go and live in a community.
Tolstoi replied to him:
“Why in a community? One ought not to separate oneself from other people. If there is anything good in a man, let that light be spread about him wherever he lives. What numbers of people settled in communities, yet nothing came of it! All their energies went at first into external arrangement of life, and when at length they settled down, there began to be quarrels and gossip, and it all fell to pieces.... You are grumbling at the Institute, yet there is the porter there whom you could treat kindly, like a human being, and then you would have done a good act. And the girls, your pupils? Can’t you make a great deal that is good out of those relations? One can always shut oneself off from people, but nothing good will come of it. I say this not because I want to justify my own life. I live in the wrong way and know it is the wrong way, but I have always wanted and tried to live better, only I could not.... I shall go to God in the consciousness that I did what I could to make my life better.
“One should never attempt to arrange life beforehand. At times I ask myself what I should do if I remained here alone? For instance, I should say to Ilya Vasilevich: ‘It would be nice if you did the rooms and tidied them to-day, and I will do them to-morrow.’ Then we should eat together. And so on with one thing after another, as things would arrange themselves. Only it has to be remembered that the ideal of the material life cannot be fully realized, any more than the ideal of the spiritual life. The whole point is in the constant effort to approach the ideal. If I gave up everything now and went away, Sophie Andreevna would hate me, and the evil of that would perhaps be worse. You have your father ... and so it is with every one.”
Tolstoi said before this:
“I said to Sophie Andreevna to-day, and I believe she was hurt by it: the first concern in life must be for the things of the soul, and, if household duties interfere with that, then damn household duties.”
Last night we sat on the balcony.