Page:The Relations Tolstoy.pdf/62

 question of course as we do, It is very joyful when one finds oneself in the dark to see a light far ahead. For me, in my egotism, it is sad to think that I have lived my life like a brute, and that I cannot now retrieve it,-sad, chiefly because it will be said: "It is all very well for you, a dying old man, to say this, but you have lived differently. When we get old we will say the same." It is in this that the chief retribution for sin consists-one feels that one is an unworthy tool for the transmission of God's will; soiled and spoilt. But then one has the consolation that others will be as they ought. May God help you and others.

I have been thinking, amongst other things connected with the Afterword, that marriage formally meant procuring a wife as property. Again, the relation to women was established by war, capture. Again, man arranged for himself the possibility of satisfying his lust without thinking about the woman: harems. Monogamy altered the number of wives but not the relation to the wife. The true relation is exactly the reverse. Man is always physically capable of the sex relations, and always can abstain. Whereas woman, especially when no longer virgin, abstains with much greater difficulty when her nature demands it normally, which may happen about once in two years. And therefore if one of the two may claim satisfaction it is in no wise the man but the woman. She may demand it, because for her it is not a passing pleasure as for the man, but on the contrary, a surrender to pain, an expectancy of pain in the future: pain, trouble and suffering. I think one should think of marriage in this way: The couple should unite loving each other spiritually; they should promise mutually that if they do have children it shall be with each other only; and the demand for amative intercourse should come from her and not from him.