28 August The main delusion in people’s lives is that each person individually thinks that the guiding principle in his life is the striving for pleasure and the abhorrence of suffering. And man by himself, without guidance, submits to this guiding principle – he seeks pleasure and tries to avoid suffering, and supposes this to be the meaning and purpose of life. But man can never live by pleasure, and cannot avoid suffering. Therefore this is not the purpose of life. And if it were, what nonsense it would be: the purpose of life – pleasure – when it doesn’t exist and cannot exist. But even if it did – the end of our life, death, is always bound up with suffering. If a sailor were to decide that his purpose was to avoid the swell of the waves, where would he make for? The purpose of life lies outside pleasure and suffering. It is attained by passing through them.
Pleasure and suffering are the breath of life: the breathing in and breathing out, food and its secretion. To make one’s purpose pleasure and the avoidance of suffering means to lose the path which intersects them.
The purpose of life is a universal or spiritual one. Unity.1 Only …
I don’t know anything more, I’m tired.
1 These ideas formed the basis of On Life which Tolstoy began in 1886.