Page:Gorky - Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi.djvu/17

 little pamphlet by Prince Kropotkin; he flamed up, and all day long explained to everyone the wisdom of anarchism, overwhelming them with his philosophizing.

"Oh, stop it, Liovushka," said Leo Nicolayevitch irritably, "you are annoying. You hammer away like a parrot at one word, freedom, freedom; but what is the sense of it? If you attained your freedom, what do you imagine would happen? In the philosophic sense, a bottomless void, and in actual life you would become an idler, a parasite. If you were free in your sense, what would bind you to life or to people? Now, birds are free, but still they build nests; you, however, wouldn't even build a nest, but would gratify your sexual feeling anywhere, like a dog. You think seriously, and you will come to see, you will come to feel, that this freedom is ultimately emptiness, boundlessness."

He frowned angrily, was silent for a while, and then added quietly, "Christ was free and so was Buddha, and both took on themselves the sins of the world and voluntarily entered the prison of earthly life. Further than that nobody has gone, nobody. And you—we—well, what's the good of talking—we are all looking for freedom from obligations towards our fellow men, whereas it is just that feeling of our obligations which has made us men, and, if those obligations were not there, we should live like the beasts."

He smiled. "And now here we are arguing