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Leo Tolstoy
Confession

My life stopped. I would breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, because I could not stop doing those things; but there was no real life in me, because there was nothing I wanted to do strongly enough to do it. If I started to want something, I knew ahead of time that it would not take away the pain in my heavy heart. If an angel had come and told me I could have anything I wanted, I do not know what I would have asked for. At times I found myself wanting to do something that I had done in the past, but then I would start to think about it, and I would know that it too was a waste of time. I did not even want to know the truth, for I believed that the truth was that there is no meaning at all in life.

It was like I had walked and walked, and now I was at the top of a cliff. There was no turning back, and there was nothing below but death.

There I was, a healthy man not yet fifty. I had a good wife who loved me, and good children. I had much wealth, and it was growing each day without much work on my part. My friends and family looked up to me. Many thousands of people knew of me through my writings. I was not crazy. The opposite was true; I was very smart. And yet I no longer wanted to live. As much as I had wanted to live when I was younger, so much I wanted to stop living now. Part of me wanted to find a way out of this, but that part had to be very smart to stop the other part from taking my life. In the eyes of the world I had every reason to live, and yet I had to hide a rope from myself, so that I would not tie it to the roof and use it to hang myself when I was alone in my room at night. I stopped going out shooting, for fear that I would use the gun to end my life. I did not know what I wanted. I wanted to run away from life, but I feared death and wanted to find a reason for living too.

I often had the feeling that someone had played a cruel joke on me. This someone had watched me grow for thirty or forty years, learning so many things, and then, when I had it all, he let me see that it was nothing, and he was now laughing at me for having believed that those things were important.

With all of my learning, I had missed the clearest truth of all, and that is that one day it will all end in death. I had seen it come already to some people that I loved. And sooner or later it was going to come to me. How do we go through life without seeing this? And how do people go on living after they see it? That is what is surprising. Life is only interesting when we forget about death. But when we wake up to the truth, then we see that there is nothing to live for that will live on after we die.

There is an old story about a traveller who runs from a dangerous wild animal. In running from the animal, he finds a dry well. As he is working his way down the side of the well, he sees an angry dragon at the bottom. He holds onto a branch growing out of the side of the well, knowing that he cannot go up and he cannot go down.

He cannot go up and he cannot go down… He must die one way or the other.

Then he sees one black mouse and one white mouse, going around and around the branch, and biting at it as they go. If the traveller does not let go of the branch, the branch itself will break in time. The traveller knows that he must die one way or the other, but he sees some honey on the leaves of the branch and he reaches out for the honey with his tongue.

I could see myself in that story. As the white and black mice of day and night chewed at the branch that was my life, I tried to find happiness in the honey that dropped from the leaves. But for me, the honey was no longer sweet. The dragon and the mice were too real; I could not take my eyes away from them. This story is the truest story that anyone could ever tell, for it is the truth that each one of us must face.

The honey that had been my reason for living in the past was no longer good enough. My friends said, "You cannot understand the meaning of life, so do not think about it. Just live." But I could no longer do that. I had already done it for too long. Death is the greatest truth, and all else is false.

The two drops of honey that had been sweetest for me – my love of family and my writing – were no longer sweet to me. I could now see that my family was in the same place that I was in. Should I let them live a stupid lie, or should I tell them the truth that would destroy them as it was destroying me? Loving them, I could not hide the truth from them. But the truth is death.

And what about my writing? I had believed that writing could have meaning even when I was dying; but now I could see that this was only true if life had meaning.

I wanted to kill myself. I was afraid of what was waiting for me after death, but I could not go through the pain of waiting for death to come either. I wanted it all to be over, and a rope or a bullet was the fastest way to end it.

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