Orthodoxy and modernity. Digital Library

"Alone."

— Different. "Alone."

"Everyone's conscience, my friend, is different. That's why the fight is happening. Both are fighting, and both are conscientious!

"Still, there is only one truth.

"Is there only one conscience too?" "Well, let the conscience be different. Conscience may also be unobscured. But the truth is, of course, one.

"And who knows the truth?"

"At least you know the truth that you need to sleep if you actually go to bed.

"Actually" again! You never know what will happen "in fact"! In fact, I am also acting. But the whole question is whether it is necessary to act and for what, for whom it is necessary to act and what is the meaning of action.

Here is a conversation from which one thing is clear, at any rate: action, activity, practice, even moral actions and moral will, are not yet the wisdom of life, which would become higher than fate. It is also necessary to take the principles of action from somewhere; You also need to know exactly how to act, in the name of what to act. This "in the name" is absent in the most volitional act. In addition, any act of will sooner or later encounters resistance. Our activities are often interrupted, and in the end, they simply end once and for all. And fate settles in all its inexorability, in all its inevitability. Death is a criticism of every action.

"Are you acting?" He he! As long as he is alive! And if you don't live? He he! Yes. Fate is insurmountable by morality, just as it is irresistible by science. The wisdom of life is not captured by the external practice of man, just as it is irreducible to the abstract laws of nature.

It was not this wisdom of life that I was waiting for

There was one wisdom that was especially out of my liking to me, which, it would seem, at first glance, at least in its content, led me closest to the new that I was experiencing, but had not yet been formulated. This is the wisdom of beauty, poetry, music, art in general.

At one time it seemed to me that here I had already found the anchor of salvation. Indeed, is not wisdom – all our writers, poets, composers? Isn't it wisdom – Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky? What other wisdom do you need? Was it not necessary for all these writers to plunge deeply, deeply into the content of life and its general laws, was it not necessary to see the secret and deepest foundations of life in order to create all these great artistic images?