Page 1694 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

He vaguely felt, too, that what he called his new
convictions were not merely lack of knowledge, but that
they were part of a whole order of ideas, in which no
knowledge of what he needed was possible.

At first, marriage, with the new joys and duties bound
up with it, had completely crowded out these thoughts.
But of late, while he was staying in Moscow after his
wife’s confinement, with nothing to do, the question that
clamored for solution had more and more often, more and
more insistently, haunted Levin’s mind.
The question was summed up for him thus: ‘If I do not
accept the answers Christianity gives to the problems of
my life, what answers do I accept?’ And in the whole
arsenal of his convictions, so far from finding any
satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find anything
at all like an answer.
He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy
shops and tool shops.
Istinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with
every conversation, with every man he met, he was on the
lookout for light on these questions and their solution.
What puzzled and distracted him above everything was
that the majority of men of his age and circle had, like
him, exchanged their old beliefs for the same new

1693 of 1759