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Title: The Blessing of Love Author: Leo Tolstoy Date: 1908 Language: en Topics: 1911 Source: Original text from http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=10603, 2021. Translated from Russian by Wikisource.
(An appeal to people-brothers)
Dear brothers, especially those of you who is now fighting for one
governmental structure or another, which nobody needs. All you, dear
brother, whoever you are, king, minister, a worker, a peasant, you need
just one thing. And this is to spend this indeterminate short moment of
life in a way that the one who sent you in this life wants.
We all know, and I've always indistinctly felt this, and further I am in
life, the clearer this is to me. Now, from today, I for the first time
clearly felt that natural for any live person proximity of tomorrow and
closeness of death, only not dreadful but as a transition that is
natural and beneficial, just as transition to the next day. Now, having
sensed this, it became to me both scary and, most importantly, strange
to think of that terrible hateful life that most of us, born for love
and for good, now live.
Who we are, what we are? Because we’re only insignificant, likely to
disappear at any moment creatures, leaped out from obscurity for a
moment into this wonderful, joyful life, with the sky, the Sun, forests,
meadows, rivers, birds, animals, with the bliss of love for all – for
family, for our own soul, for the kindness, and for all living beings.
And so what? We, these creatures, don’t find anything better rather than
to give this short, uncertain moment of life, on the verge of being
interrupted at any minute, - to disfigure it with ten-storied buildings,
pavements, smoke, smog, to bury ourselves in these slums, descend under
the Earth to extract the stones and iron to build railroads delivering
worldwide unnecessary to anyone people and unnecessary products, and,
most importantly, instead of leading a joyful life, life of love, - to
hate, fear, harass, hassle, kill, lock, execute, to learn to kill, and
to kill each other.
This is awful indeed!
Those, who do this, say that they do all of this in order to get rid of
everything bad and, what’s more dishonest, they say they are doing this
to save people from evil, that by doing this they’re guided by love to
people.
Dear brothers, come to your senses, look, think about your weakness,
that in this elusive short period of life between the two eternities or
rather two timelessnesses, - think about the life for which love is the
highest benefit, think about how insane it is not to do what is natural
for you to do but instead to do what you are doing.
To you in your darkness, supported by involuntary public opinion,
everything you do seems to be an inevitable prerequisite of life of the
people of our time, and that what you do is taking part in the life of
mankind worldwide, that you can't not to do what you were doing and are
doing and feel it’s necessary to do. But it would be nice to think so if
what you're doing coincided with the demands of your soul, if that
benefited you and other people. But this is not the case. The life of
the world, of the whole humanity, the way it goes now, requires from you
anger and involvement in a work unloving to some brothers of yours for
the sake of others, does no good to others, neither to you.
"But we are working for the future", they answer. But why a life of love
in the present, now, needs to be sacrificed for some unknown to us
future life? Isn't it obvious that this is a strange, harmful
superstition? I know, without a doubt, know that life is in love and in
the law of God and in the demand of my heart and happiness for me and
for others, and suddenly some kind of abstract reasoning will make me
abandon my very unquestionable blessing, my duty, my law… For the sake
of what? For nothing. For the sake of a tradition, a habit, an
imitation.
Let only the fighter for “freedom” or "order" put one hundredth of the
efforts and the victims which he puts to fight for the sake of his
ideas, - to increase the love in himself and others, and he - not like
in the act of fight which doesn’t have visible results but are only
expected, - he’ll immediately see the fruits of his labor of love and
not only in himself: in the great joy of love, but also in the
footprints which inevitably this activity leaves on others. Dear
brothers, please wake up, get rid of that awful inertia, delusion (the
delusion that fight, the animal fight, may be innate and not detrimental
to a human); and you will know the joy, blessing, holiness of life,
indestructible by anything: neither by attacks of other people because
these attacks will only strengthen the reason for love, nor by fear of
death because love doesn’t have death.
Dear brothers, I don’t dare to say: "believe me, believe me," - do not
believe but check what I'm saying, check it out for at least one day. At
least one day, staying in those conditions in which the day caught you,
give yourself a task in any deed of the day to be guided only by love.
And I know that once you do this, you won't return back to those old,
terrible, destructive beliefs.
I ask you one thing, dear brothers: just question whether that life,
which has evolved among us, is the one that should be (this life is a
perversion of life), and believe that love is the purpose, the essence,
the benefit of our life, and that strive for something good that lives
in every heart, that sorrow over something that is missing yet what we
should have: bliss - that legitimate sense which should be satisfied and
gets satisfied easily if only people don’t consider life, as now, what
is a perversion of it.
Dear brothers, for your sake, do this: doubt in this seemingly important
outward life you live, understand that, not talking about your personal
fame, wealth, etc., all those imaginary devices of social life of
millions and millions of people, all of this is insignificant and
pitiful trivia, compared to that soul which you acknowledge in yourself
in this short moment of life between birth and death, and which
incessantly declares its requirements to you. Live only for it and by
it, by love to which it calls you, and all the blessings, for you and
all people, that you only can dream of will come true in countless more
times. Only believe in the blessing of love which is open to you and
calling you.
August 21, 1908.
P.S. I thought I would die in that day when I wrote this. I didn't die,
but my faith in what I have expressed here remains the same, and I know
that will not change until my death, which in any case should occur very
soon. Lev Tolstoy