e dusty road, not noticing
the heat nor his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief
from prolonged suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it
seemed to him incredible. He was breathless with emotion and
incapable of going farther; he turned off the road into the
forest and lay down in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass.
He took his hat off his hot head and lay propped on his elbow in
the lush, feathery, woodland grass.

"Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand," he thought,
looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and
following the movements of a green beetle, advancing along a
blade of couch-grass and lifting up in its progress a leaf of
goat-weed. "What have I discovered?" he asked himself, bending
aside the leaf of goat-weed out of the beetle's way and twisting
another blade of grass above for the beetle to cross over onto
it. "What is it makes me glad? What have I discovered?

"I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew.
I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too
gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found
the Master.

"Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this
grass and of this beetle (there, she didn't care for the grass,
she's opened her wings and flown away), there was going on a
transformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical,
and physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the
aspens and the clouds and the misty patches, there was a process
of evolution. Evolution from what? into what?--Eternal evolution
and struggle.... As though there could be any sort of tendency
and struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished that in spite
of the utmost effort of thought along that road I could not
discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and
yearnings. Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: 'To
live for God, for my soul.' And this meaning, in spite of its
clearness, is mysterious and marvelous. Such, indeed, is the
meaning of everything existing. Yes, pride," he said to himself,
turning over on his stomach and beginning to tie a noose of
blades of grass, trying not to break them.

"And not merely pride of intellect, but dulness of intellect.
And most of all, the deceitfulness; yes, the deceitfulness of
intellect. The cheating knavishness of intellect, that's it," he
said to himself.

And he briefly went through, mentally, the whol