Tolstoy perspective

    → Mid-Life Crisis, A descent into pessimism: Faith → An ascent Back out of Pessimism

Mid-life Crisis:

→ How did he get into a pessimistic perspective on life?

        → Hard time finding the force to get out of bed, no enthusiasm to live life

        →He was convinced there was no “reasonable meaning” to life: that nothing could make life worth living.

    → Each achievement had a finite value (in years, it would not matter.)

    → He describes this mindset as a consequence of a disease??

    → He explains the descent in a pessimistic mindset, as an eastern fable, the tale of a traveller overtaken by an enraged beast.

            → the traveller = Tolstoy, the traveler’s plight = Tolstoy’s descent into pessimism by his midlife crisis.

            → Rabid beast represents troubles found in life

            → Dragon at the end of the well represents inevitable death.

            ** There is no lasting benefit to any good thing he could do in life; therefore, nothing he would do would ever be good enough…

End of midlife crisis:

    → His faith amounts to belief in a divine being who rewards those who follow his will.

    → Faith showed him that although his natural life was finite, it could have infinite value

→ Pascal: Even if you don’t know for sure that there is a divine being, it is best to live your life according to divinity just in case. ( nothing to lose, only things to gain)

→ Unlike faith, science and rational knowledge cannot help us out of this mindset, as it only ever points in the direction of finite (all about the natural world)