Page 1717 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

he said to himself, turning over on his stomach and
beginning to tie a noose of blades of grass, trying not to
break them.
‘And not merely pride of intellect, but dulness of

intellect. And most of all, the deceitfulness; yes, the
deceitfulness of intellect. The cheating knavishness of
intellect, that’s it,’ he said to himself.
And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole
course of his ideas during the last two years, the beginning
of which was the clear confronting of death at the sight of
his dear brother hopelessly ill.
Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man,
and himself too, there was nothing in store but suffering,
death, and forgetfulness, he had made up his mind that life
was impossible like that, and that he must either interpret
life so that it would not present itself to him as the evil jest
of some devil, or shoot himself.
But he had not done either, but had gone on living,
thinking, and feeling, and had even at that very time
married, and had had many joys and had been happy,
when he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.
What did this mean? It meant that he had been living
rightly, but thinking wrongly.

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