Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/80

 He wept on account of his helplessness, his terrible loneliness, the cruelty of men, the cruelty of God, the absence of God.

"Why hast Thou done all this? Why didst Thou bring me to this? Why, why dost Thou torment me so terribly?"

He did not expect any answer, and was weeping because there was no answer and could be none. The pain rose again, but he did not stir, did not call. He said to himself:

"Go on, strike me! But for what? What have I done to Thee? For what?"

Then he grew silent and stopped not only weeping, but also breathing, and became all attention: it was as though he listened, not to the voice which spoke with sounds, but to the voice of his soul, to the train of thoughts which rose in him.

"What do you want?" was the first clear expression, capable of being uttered in words, which he heard.

"What do you want? What do you want?" he repeated to himself. "What? Not to suffer. To live!" he answered.

And again he abandoned himself wholly to attention, to such tense listening, that his pain even did not distract him.

"To live? To live how?" asked the voice of his soul.

"To live as I used to live before, well,—pleasantly."

"As you lived before, well and pleasantly?" asked a voice. And he began in imagination to pass in review the best minutes of his pleasant life. But, strange to say, all these best minutes of his pleasant life now seemed to him to be different from what they had seemed to be before,—all of them, except the first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something really agreeable, with which it would be possible to live if life should return; but the man who had expe-