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199:. Being fully aware that life is ephemeral, one can enjoy the time one has. Tolstoy's problem with this is essentially moral. He states that Epicureanism may work fine and well for the minority who can afford to live "the good life," but one would have to be morally empty to be able to ignore the fact that the vast majority of people do not have access to the wealth necessary to live this kind of life.
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Tolstoy next states that the most intellectually honest response to the situation would be suicide. In the face of the inevitability of death and assuming that God does not exist, why wait? Why pretend that this vale of tears means anything when one can just cut to the chase? For himself, however,
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The story begins with the
Eastern fable of the dragon in the well. A man is chased by a beast into a well, at the bottom of which is a dragon. The man clings to a branch that is being gnawed on by two mice (one black, one white, representing night and day and the relentless march of time). The man
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The book is a brief autobiographical story of the author's struggle with a mid-life existential crisis. It describes his search for the answer to the ultimate philosophical question: "If God does not exist, since death is inevitable, what is the meaning of life?" Without the answer to this, for him,
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Tolstoy goes on to describe four possible attitudes towards this dilemma. The first is ignorance. If one is oblivious to the fact that death is approaching, life becomes bearable. The problem with this for him personally is that he is
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So
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Finally, Tolstoy says that the fourth option, the one he is taking, is the one of just holding on; living "despite the
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The
Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
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The first attempt at its publication took place in 1882 (
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The
Triumph of the Farmer or Industry and Parasitism
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The second possibility is what
Tolstoy describes as
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866:How Much Land Does a Man Need?
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253:(also published in English as
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167:by the Russian novelist
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374:James, William (1917).
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982:The Power of Darkness
824:Where Love Is, God Is
613:A Landowner's Morning
340:"The gospel in brief"
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215:Cosmological Argument
1371:Books by Leo Tolstoy
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427:, from RevoltLib.com
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1097:A Letter to a Hindu
1073:What Is to Be Done?
1057:The Gospel in Brief
1022:The Cause of It All
990:The First Distiller
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726:Sevastopol Sketches
661:The Kreutzer Sonata
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1174:Lev Lvovich
1033:Non-fiction
621:Two Hussars
594:Hadji Murat
510:Leo Tolstoy
255:My Religion
169:Leo Tolstoy
157:melancholia
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1244:2009 film)
1182:(daughter)
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1123:Unfinished
1049:Confession
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165:religion
146:Íspovedʹ
133:Исповедь
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546:Boyhood
380:Longman
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225:History
175:Content
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