to others. You are haunted by your conception of yourself. People who live in this way imagine that there are other people who are enjoying career splendor and private joy. That loser in college who did nothing but watch TV is now a big movie producer; that quiet guy in the training program is now a billionaire hedge fund manager. What does it profit a man to sell his own soul if others are selling theirs and getting more for it?
FOUR
The Valley
Leo Tolstoy had one of the most successful first mountains in human history. As a young man he joined the army and sowed his wild oats. He had his adventures, his love affairs; he challenged men to duels. Then he tried to make a name for himself as a great intellectual. He gathered with a group of his fellows and together they launched radical magazines, wrote essays, and tried to spread enlightenment. He became a novelist and succeeded beyond anybody’s wildest imaginings. The results were War and Peace and Anna Karenina and much else.
He was not a moral slacker, either. Tolstoy was always giving up things in order to make himself a better person: tobacco, hunting, alcohol, meat. He wrote up rules for himself so he could love people more and treat all others equally and that sort of thing.
His faith in those years, he later recalled, was in perfecting himself:
I tried to achieve intellectual perfection; I studied everything I could, everything that life gave me a chance to study. I tried to perfect my will and set up rules for myself that I endeavored to follow. I strove for physical perfection by doing all the exercises that develop strength and agility and undergoing all the hardships that discipline the self in endurance and perseverance. I took all this to be perfection. The starting point of it all was, of course, moral perfection, but this was soon replaced by a belief in overall perfection, that is, a desire to be better not in my own eyes or in the eyes of God, but rather a desire to be better in the eyes of other people.
Then life hit him with its blows. His brother Nicholas died at age thirty-seven. He was a good, serious man who never understood why he lived or why he died. No theories Tolstoy could think of could explain his brother’s death.
Then Tolstoy had an experience that persuaded him that there is a good far greater than his prestige and perfection. It was absolute truth, something that is not built by human reason but simply exists. Tolstoy was in Paris when he witnessed an execution.
When I saw how the head was severed from the body and heard the thud of each part as it fell into the box, I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act; I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgments must be based on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do.
Tolstoy had thus far bet his life on the enlightenment project, on reason, progress, intellectuals, public approval, and progress. And now he lost faith in that project. What was the point of life?
My life came to a stop. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep; indeed, I could not help but breathe, eat, drink, and sleep. But there was no life in me because I had no desires whose satisfaction I would have found reasonable. If I wanted something, I knew beforehand that it did not matter whether or not I got it.
Life began to feel absurd and useless. He removed all the ropes from his room so he would not hang himself. He kept himself away from his hunting rifles so he would not shoot himself. He began to regard his former writing intellectual life as a form of madness. Who could really care if he got a good review in this or that journal? It now seemed that he and his cronies hadn’t been improving the world, just writing to become rich and famous. Tolstoy was sick of life and saw no point in it. He was in the valley.
If this sense of lostness can happen to a Tolstoy, then