Anna Karenina

When Levin thought what he was and what he was living for, 'he could find no answer to the questions and was reduced to despair, but he left off questioning himself about it.' It seemed as though he knew both what he was and for what he was living, 'for he acted and lived resolutely and without hesitation.' Indeed, in these latter days 'he was far more decided and unhesitating in life than he had ever been.' When he went back to the country in June, he returned to his usual pursuits: management of the estate, relations with peasants and neighbors, care of household, management of his sister's and brother's property, relations with his wife and kindred, care of his child, 'and the new bee-keeping hobby he had taken up that spring.' These things occupied him now 'not because he justified them to himself by any sort of general principles, as he had done in former days.' Disappointed by the failure of his former efforts for the general welfare, too much occupied with his own thought and the mass of business, 'he had completely given up thinking of the general good, and he busied himself with all this work simply because it seemed to him that he must do what he was doing—that he could not do otherwise.' Whether acting rightly or wrongly he did not know, 'and far from trying to prove that he was, nowadays he avoided all thought or talk about it.' Reasoning had brought him to doubt, prevented him from seeing what he ought to do. 'When he did not think, but simply lived, he was continually aware of the presence of an infallible judge in his soul, determining which of two possible courses of action was the better and which was the worse.' As soon as he did not act rightly, he was at once aware of it. 'So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and what he was living for, and harassed at this lack of knowledge to such a point that he was afraid of suicide, and yet firmly laying down his own individual definite path in life.'