Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/484

 yourself, that is, of what you wish to be, and to live in such a way as to attain that which you wish to be.

The whole matter is in continence. As soon as people will find their good in continence, marriages will be moderated.

A man will never succeed in getting married in order to live more happily. To set marriage, the union with whom one loves, as the chief, all-absorbing aim of one's life, is a great error, and a palpable error, if you reflect on it. The aim is marriage. Well, you are married, what then? If there was no other aim before marriage, it will be very difficult, almost impossible, for the two to find it later. It is even sure, if there was no common aim before marriage, that you will under no condition come together, but will be sure to separate. Marriage gives happiness only when there is one common aim. People meet on the road, and say: "Let us go together." "Let us go," and they take each other's hands; but not when, attracted by one another, they get off the road.

All this is so because equally false is the conception, shared by many, that life is a valley of tears, and the other, which is shared by a vast majority, and to which you are inclined by youth and health and riches, that life is a place of enjoyment. Life is a place of service, where one has frequently to endure many hardships, but oftener still to experience very many joys. But there can be true joys only when men themselves understand their life as service,―when they have a definite aim of life which is outside them, outside their personal happiness. People who get married generally forget this completely. There are to be so many happy incidents in marriage, the birth of children, that, it seems, these incidents will form life itself, but that is a dangerous deception. If the parents live on and bring forth children,