3) “Why is it that after sin, suffering does not follow that person who committed the sin? Then he would see what ought not to be done”—because people live not separately but in society and if every one suffered from the sin of each one, then every one would have to resist it.
4) Conscience is the memory of society assimilated by separate individuals.
5) In old age you experience the same thing as on a journey. At first your thoughts are on that place from which you are going, then on the journey itself, and then on the place to which you are going.
I experience this more and more often, thinking of death.
6) It is true that a great sin might be beneficial, by calling forth repentance before God, independently from human judgment. Such a sin leads one away from the realm of human judgment, from vanity, which masters man and hides from him his relation to God.[387]
7) The physical growth is only a preparation of material for spiritual work, the service to God and man which begins with the withering of the body.
To-day Oct. 13. Y. P.
I am still not fully well. It is as it ought to be. But that does not hinder from living, thinking and moving towards a fixed goal. Resurrection advances poorly. Have sent away four chapters, I think not passable by the censor, but at least I think I have settled on one point, and that I won’t make any more great important changes. I do not cease thinking of brother Sergei, but because of the weather and ill health I cannot make up my mind to go.... Sonya was in Moscow and is going again to-day. To-day I had a kind of intellectual idleness, not only to-day, but all these latter days. For Resurrection I have thought out good scenes. Concerning separateness which appears to us as matter in space and movement in time, I am thinking more and more often and more and more clearly.
I have also received Westrup’s pamphlets from America about the money,[388] which struck me by explaining everything that was unclear in financial questions and reducing everything as it ought to be, to violence.... If I get time I will write it out. I have another important, joyous thought, although an old one, but which came to me as a new one and which makes me very happy, namely:
1) The principal cause of family unhappiness—is because people are brought up to think that marriage gives happiness. Sex attraction induces to marriage and it takes the form of a promise, a hope, for happiness, which is supported by public opinion and literature; but marriage is not happiness, but always suffering, which man pays for the satisfaction of his sex desire. Suffering in the form of lack of freedom, slavery, over-satiety, disgust of all kinds of spiritual and physical defects of the mate which one has to bear; maliciousness, stupidity, falsity, vanity, drunkenness, laziness, miserliness, greed and corruption—all defects which are especially difficult to bear when not in oneself but in another person, and from which one suffers as if they were one’s own; and the same with physical defects: ugliness, uncleanliness, stench, sores, insanity, etc., which are even more difficult to bear when not in oneself. All this, or at least something of this, will always be and to bear them will be difficult for every one. But that which ought to compensate: the care, satisfaction, aid, all these things are taken as a matter of course; while all defects as if they were not a matter of course, and the more one expected happiness from marriage the more one suffers.