A Confession

Tolstoy says that he lost his way because he lived a bad life. The meaning of life was hidden from him because he lived a life “squandered in the satisfaction of lusts” (68). Tolstoy eventually realized that a person must “live his life not for himself but for all” (70).

He writes that life plays out according to the will of a higher power and that people should do what they are called to do by this power, otherwise they will never understand the purpose of life. Tolstoy offers the analogy of a poor servant who is given a job pulling a lever and performs the work unquestioningly. Over time, she comes to learn how the whole apparatus works. She is unlike members of the elite classes who would “speculate on why we should do something so stupid as moving this lever up and down” (71) and come to incorrect, self-serving conclusions about the apparatus without ever understanding how it works.

Tolstoy says he realized that the only satisfactory life is the simple working life and determined to try this mode of living. An agonizing year of searching for God followed. He tried to refute his former reasoning by saying that causation exists outside of space and time and that God caused him to exist.