Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2 полностью

Cold is the absence of warmth. Darkness is the absence of light. Evil is the absence of good. Why does man love warmth, light and good? Because they are natural. There is an origin of warmth, light and good – the sun, God; but there is no sun of cold and darkness, no God of evil. We see the light and the rays of light, we seek their cause and we say that the sun exists: our proof is both the light and heat, and the law of gravity. This is in the physical world. In the moral world we see the good, see its rays, and we see that there is the same law of attraction of the good towards something higher which is its source – God.—

Remove the rough outer crust from a diamond, and inside there will be – brightness; discard the envelope of human weaknesses, and you will have – virtue. But can it be only those trivialities and weaknesses you record in your journal which are preventing you from being good? Are there not also some great passions? And how is it that this host of weaknesses increases with every day that passes?: now self-deception, now cowardice, etc., and that there is never any lasting improvement, and in many instances no way forward? (It is once again the part of me devoted to criticism which has observed all this.) True, all these weaknesses I have noted down can be reduced to three types, but since all of them can be found at many different levels, their combinations may be countless. The three categories are: (1) pride, (2) weakness of will, (3) lack of intelligence. But it is impossible to attribute all these weaknesses individually to one of the three types, for they arise from combinations of them. The first two types have diminished, but the last, as a separate element, can only make progress over time. For example, today I told a lie, quite clearly without any apparent reason: I was called to dinner and I declined to come, then said that I could not because I was due to have a lesson.—What sort of a lesson?—English (whereas in fact it was a gymnastics lesson). The causes were: (1) lack of intelligence, in that I suddenly failed to see how stupid it is to lie; (2) lack of resolution, in that I did not explain why; (3) a silly kind of pride, in supposing that English might be a more suitable excuse than gymnastics.

Can virtue really consist in freeing yourself from the weaknesses which are harmful to you in life, so that virtue would seem to be identical with selflessness?—Not so. Virtue brings happiness, because happiness brings virtue.—Every time I write something honestly in my diary, I feel no vexation with myself for my weaknesses: it seems to me that if I have owned up to having them, then they are no longer there.

A pleasant thought. I said my prayers and got into bed. I pray better at night than in the morning. I have a better understanding of what I am saying, and even of what I feel; at the end of the day I am not anxious for myself, but in the morning I am – there is so much ahead of me in the coming day. What a wonderful thing is sleep in all its stages: getting ready for it, going to sleep, sleep itself. As soon as I had lain down I thought: What delight to escape into this growing warmth and presently to forget myself entirely; but hardly had I begun to fall asleep than I recollected that it was pleasant to fall asleep, and woke up again. All the pleasures of the body are destroyed by consciousness of them. One must avoid being conscious: but I was conscious that I was conscious, and so it went on and on, and I could not sleep. Oh, the vexation of it! What did God give us consciousness for, when it serves merely as a barrier to living? He did so because our moral pleasures, unlike the physical ones, are felt more deeply when we are conscious of them. Reasoning in this fashion I turned over on to my other side, and the bedclothes fell off. What an unpleasant sensation it is to lose your bedclothes in the dark. One always feels: someone or something may come and grab me, or lay a cold or a hot hand on my uncovered leg. I hastened to cover myself up, tucked the blanket under me on both sides, hid my head in the covers, and began to fall asleep, thinking to myself as follows.