Recalling My Reading of Tolstoy's Confession

Leo Tolstoy was a great writer and a profound thinker. I am neither. Yet I have something in common with him. For whatever reason – perhaps my time at the hospital among other things – death became more real to me than our psyches are wired to process. The understanding that transience and mortality threaten meaning; the feeling that love longs for permanence; that only what is permanent truly has being – that once we love anything and thus are joyful at its very existence, death, nothingness negates it – these things I felt long before I could consciously articulate them. Reading Tolstoy’s A Confession brought these inchoate feelings to full consciousness. The book will not speak to anyone not already haunted by these inchoate feelings.

    Like Tolstoy, I studied many great books containing much human wisdom, trying to find something to hold on to. I was once inspired by the premise of the Enlightenment: only through the use of a thoroughly secularized, presuppositionless version of reason could people see through superstition and see the world right. But reading A Confession spoke to my heart: the meaning of life does not reveal itself to purely secularized reason; you cannot construct a rational proof evident to anyone that life is meaningful. The ultimate lesson I took from A Confession was this: that the meaning of life is only revealed to those who already have faith in it. Rather like the meaning of the painfully beautiful Bach song Die Schafe können sicher weiden can only reveal itself to those who have become part of a certain tradition. You probably already have to be in this tradition to be able to hear the beauty. You can make it your own with a little effort.

 

Link to the performance of the Bach song that I love:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt3DEuw0wjM