Eternal answers...

I remember one day in early spring, I was alone in the forest, lending my ear to its mysterious noises. I listened, and my thought went back to what for these three years it always was busy with - the quest of God. But the idea of him, I said, how did I ever come by the idea?

And again there arose in me, with this thought, glad aspirations towards life. Everything in me awoke and received a meaning... Why do I look further? a voice within me asked. He is there: he, without whom one cannot live. To acknowledge God and live are one and the same thing. God is what life is. Well, then I live, seek God, and there will be no life without him...

After this, things cleared up within me and about me better than ever, and the light has never wholly died away. I was saved from suicide. Just how or when the change took place I cannot tell. But as insensibly and gradually as the force of life had been annulled within me, and I had reached my moral death-bed, just as gradually and imperceptibly did the energy of life come back. And what was strange was that this energy that came back was nothing new. It was my ancient juvenile force of faith, the belief that the sole purpose of my life was to be better. I gave up the life of the conventional world, recognizing it to be no life, but a parody on life, which its superfluities simply keep us from comprehending.

Tolstoy (abridged)

And Tolstoy thereupon embraced the life of the peasants, and has felt right and happy, or at least relatively so, ever since.

I was speaking to a friend last night and he mentioned his feeling of how unpleasant life often feels. His problem with life seemed a little bit similar to that of Tolstoy: in William James' words, "the superfluities and insincerities, the cupidities, complications, and cruelties of our polite civilization are profoundly unsatisfying". And they are.

There seems to be something that heals, something that has the potential to break the effective edge of sadness, in the very act of accepting an eternal answer to our deepest questions, even when this answer is as mysterious as God (or 'the eternal', or 'the MORE', or 'the Wholly Other') can be. I am not speaking here of answers in the doctrine-dogma-system way, but rather in the acceptance that there is, in fact, an eternal answer (although it may not be possible to put it into logical and reasoned words).

I find this a very interesting thought... Perhaps even satisfying...