Archer was here yesterday, arriving from Chertkov—I liked him.[365] There is much to do, but I am all absorbed in Resurrection, being sparing with the water and using it only for Resurrection. It seems to me it won’t be bad. People praise it, but I don’t believe.
Everything that I noted—it was all very important—I will write out later, but now I want to write that which I just now, walking on the path, in the evening, not only thought but felt clearly:
1) Under my feet there is the frozen, hard earth; around, enormous trees; overhead a cloudy sky; I fed my body, I feel pain in the head; I am occupied with thoughts on Resurrection; and yet I know, I feel in all my being, that both the firm and frozen earth and the trees and the sky and my body and my thoughts—all this is only a product of my five senses, my image, the world, made by me because such is my partition from the world. And that it will be sufficient for me to die—and all this will not disappear but will become transformed, as they make transformations in the theatres: from bushes and stones, they make castles, towers, etc. Death is nothing else than such a transformation, dependent from another partition from the world, another personality: Here I consider as myself, my body with my senses, and then something else will detach itself to be myself. And then the whole world will become something else. But the world is such and not something else, only because I consider myself as this and not as something else. But there can be an innumerable quantity of divisions of the world. (This is not entirely clear for others, but for me—very.)[366]
Nov. 3. If I live.
Nov. 14. Y. P.
Again I have not noticed how 11 days have passed. Have been very intensely occupied with Resurrection and am making good progress. Am absolutely near the end. Serezha and Suller were here and both went away to the Caucasus with my letter to Golitsin.[367] S. arrived yesterday. Very well. It is a long time since I have felt so well and keen, intellectually and physically.
I cannot make out what I have written out and what I haven’t.[368]
1) How difficult it is to please people! In order to please them it is necessary that the past and the future meet their demands. But in order to please God, one has only to satisfy His demands in the present.
2) To live for others seems difficult—just as to work seems difficult. But just as in work, in the care for others there may be the best reward: love of others may and may not be; while in labour there is an inner reward, you work to the end, get tired, and you feel good.
3) The poetry of the past occupied itself only with the strong of the world: with the Czars, etc., because the strong of the world appeared as the highest and the most complete representatives of the people. But if you take the plain people, then it is necessary that they express general phenomena ... (Unclear.)