Tolstoy - A Confession
I remember one day in the early springtime I was listening to the sounds of a wood, and thinking only of one thing, the same of which I had constantly thought for two years – I was again seeking God.
I said to myself: “It is well, there is no God, there is none that has a reality apart from my own imaginings, none as real as my own life – there is none such. Nothing, no miracles can prove there is, for miracles only exist in my own unreasonable imagination.”
And then I asked myself: “But my conception of the God whom I seek, whence comes it?” And again life flashed joyously through my veins. All around me seemed to revive, to have a new meaning. My joy, though, did not last long, for reason continued its work: “The conception of God is not God. Conception is what goes on within myself; the conception of God is an idea which I am able to rouse in my mind or not as I choose; it is not what I seek, something without which life could not be.” Then again all seemed to die around and within me, and again I wished to kill myself. After this I began to retrace the process which had gone on within myself, the hundred times repeated discouragement and revival. I remembered that I had lived only when I believed in a God. As it was before, so it was now; I had only to know God, and I lived; I had only to forget Him, not to believe In Him, and I died. What was this discouragement and revival? I do not live when I lose faith in the existence of a God; I should long ago have killed myself, if I had not had a dim hope of finding Him. I only really live when I feel and seek Him. “What more, then, do I seek?” A voice seemed to cry within me, “This is He, He without whom there is no life. To know God and to live are one. God is life.”
Live to seek God, and life will not be without Him. And stronger than ever rose up life within and around me, and the light that then shone never left me again.
Thus I was saved from self-murder. When and how this change in me took place I could not say. As gradually, imperceptibly as life had decayed in me, till I reached the impossibility of living, till life stood still, and I longed to kill myself, so gradually and imperceptibly I felt the glow and strength of life return to me.