Page:The Relations Tolstoy.pdf/37

 beaten and killed. I know your religious and loving soul, and am therefore certain that you will overcome the wolf, if such it is. Yes, one cannot love everyone equally. And it is a great happiness to love intensely if it be only one individual, -but the love should be indeed of him or her and not of oneself, not of the delight one experiences in these relations and feelings.

I have often thought of the state of "being in love," and could find no place or meaning for it. And yet its place and meaning are very clear and definite: They consist in lessening the struggle between lust and chastity. "Being in love" must, in the case of youths who cannot endure complete chastity, precede marriage and deliver them in the most critical years -from sixteen to twenty, and beyond from an exceedingly painful struggle. Here is the place of "being in love." But when it breaks into the life of individuals after marriage it is out of place and obnoxious.

For me the solution to the question whether it is well to be "in love" or not is clear. If man be already living a human, spiritual life, then being in love and marriage will be for him a fall: he will have to give part of his powers to his wife or family or the object of his love. But if he be on the animal plane, the eating, working, writing plane, then being in love will be for him an ascent, as with animals and insects.

I do not think that you require the society of women, that is, any special spiritual communion with them. Social intercourse with