the oriental fable of the traveler surprised in the desert by a wild beast is very old.
The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish; but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue and licks them off with rapture.
Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why i am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer, and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the branch to which i cling.
i can see but 1 thing; the inevitable dragon and the mice—i cannot turn my gaze away from them.
this is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which every one may understand. What will be the outcome of what i do to-day? of what i shall do tomorrow? What will be outcome of all my life? Why should I live? why should i do anything? is there in mlife any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?
these questions are the simplest in the world. from the child to the wisest, they are i te n soul of every human being. without an answer to them, it is impossible, as i experience,d fro life to go on.
but perhaps, i often said to myself, there may be something i have failed to notice or to comprehend. it is not possible that this condition of despair should be natural to mankind. and i sought for an explanation in all the brancehs of knowledge acquired by men. i questioned parinfully and protractedly and with hono idel curiousity. i sought, not with indolence, but labiourlsy and obstantely for days and nights together. i southght liek a man who is lost and seeks to save himself —iand i found nothing. i became convinced, moreoever, that all those who before me had sought for an snsewr in the sciences have also found nothing. and not only this, but athat they have recongnized that the veryth ing which was leading me to despari—the meaningless absurdity of life—is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

he finds only 4 ways in which humans of his own class and society anre accustomed to meet the situation.
1) animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing the dragon or the mice
2)reflective epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts, which is only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the 1st
3) “manly” suicide
4) seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintively clinging to the bush of life.

yet, says Tolstoy, “whilst my intellect was working, something else in me was working too, and kept me from the deed—a consciousness of life, as I may call it, which was like a force that obliged my mind to fix itself in another direction and draw me out of my situation of despair . . . During the whole course of this year, when I almost unceasingly kept asking myself how to end the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet, during all that time, alongside of all those movements of my ideas and observations, my heart kept languishing with another pining emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of a thirst for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the movement of myt ideas, in fact, it was the direct contrary of that movement - but it came from my heart. it was like a feeling of dreadd that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in the midst of all these things that they were so foreign. and this feeling of dread was mitigated by the hope of finding th assistance of some one.
it may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministrerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical resource. This question must confronts us on a later day. But provisionally, and as a mere matter of program and method, since the evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope. The compleset religions would therefore seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and christianity are the best known to us of these. They are ressentially relgiions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life.

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