Nerzhin spoke, evidently delivering thoughts long pondered.
“When I was outside and read what wise men had to say about the meaning of life, or happiness, I always found it difficult to understand. I treated them with respect: They were sages, doing what they were supposed to do. But the meaning of life? We are alive, and that’s what it means. Happiness? When life is very good to us, that’s happiness, everybody knows. . . . Prison has my blessing! It’s made me think. To understand what happiness means, let us first consider being full. Remember the Lubyanka or your time in counterintelligence. Remember that thin, watery porridge of oats or barley, without a single sparkle of fat. Do you just eat it? Just dine on it? No—it’s Holy Communion! You receive it with awed reverence, as though it were the life’s breath of the yogis! You eat it slowly, eat it from the tip of a wooden spoon, eat it utterly absorbed in the process of eating, the thought of eating—and the pleasurable feeling suffuses your whole body, like nectar; you are dizzy with the sweetness which you discover in these mushy boiled grains and the dishwater that holds them together. And—lo and behold!—you live six months, live twelve months on a diet of next to nothing! Pigging out on choice chops can’t compare!”
Rubin could not and never did listen for long. His idea of conversation (and this was how it usually went) was to strew before his friends the intellectual booty captured by his quick mind. As usual, he was eager to interrupt, but Nerzhin gripped the front of his overalls with five fingers and shook him to prevent him from speaking.
“So in our own wretched persons and from our unhappy comrades, we learn what it means to eat our fill. It doesn’t depend on how much we eat, not at all, but on how we eat! It’s the same with happiness, Lyovushka, it’s exactly the same; it doesn’t depend at all on the size of the good things we’ve wrested from life. It depends solely on our attitude to them! As the Taoist ethic has it: ‘He who knows how to be content will always be content.’ ”
(...)
“Listen, shaggy beard! The happiness of continual victory, the happiness of desire triumphantly gratified, the happiness of total satisfaction . . . is suffering! It is the death of the soul; it is a sort of permanent moral dyspepsia! Never mind the philosophers of the Vedas and the Sankhya. I, Gleb Nerzhin, I myself, a prisoner in harness for five years, have risen by my own efforts to a level of development at which the bad can also be seen as the good, and it is my firm belief that people do not know themselves what they should aspire to. They squander their strength in the pointless scramble for a handful of material goods and die without even discovering their own spiritual riches. When Lev Tolstoy dreamed of being put in prison, he was thinking like a genuinely clear-sighted man with a healthy spiritual life.”
Excerpt From: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. “In the First Circle.” HarperCollins.
“When I was outside and read what wise men had to say about the meaning of life, or happiness, I always found it difficult to understand. I treated them with respect: They were sages, doing what they were supposed to do. But the meaning of life? We are alive, and that’s what it means. Happiness? When life is very good to us, that’s happiness, everybody knows. . . . Prison has my blessing! It’s made me think. To understand what happiness means, let us first consider being full. Remember the Lubyanka or your time in counterintelligence. Remember that thin, watery porridge of oats or barley, without a single sparkle of fat. Do you just eat it? Just dine on it? No—it’s Holy Communion! You receive it with awed reverence, as though it were the life’s breath of the yogis! You eat it slowly, eat it from the tip of a wooden spoon, eat it utterly absorbed in the process of eating, the thought of eating—and the pleasurable feeling suffuses your whole body, like nectar; you are dizzy with the sweetness which you discover in these mushy boiled grains and the dishwater that holds them together. And—lo and behold!—you live six months, live twelve months on a diet of next to nothing! Pigging out on choice chops can’t compare!”
Rubin could not and never did listen for long. His idea of conversation (and this was how it usually went) was to strew before his friends the intellectual booty captured by his quick mind. As usual, he was eager to interrupt, but Nerzhin gripped the front of his overalls with five fingers and shook him to prevent him from speaking.
“So in our own wretched persons and from our unhappy comrades, we learn what it means to eat our fill. It doesn’t depend on how much we eat, not at all, but on how we eat! It’s the same with happiness, Lyovushka, it’s exactly the same; it doesn’t depend at all on the size of the good things we’ve wrested from life. It depends solely on our attitude to them! As the Taoist ethic has it: ‘He who knows how to be content will always be content.’ ”
(...)
“Listen, shaggy beard! The happiness of continual victory, the happiness of desire triumphantly gratified, the happiness of total satisfaction . . . is suffering! It is the death of the soul; it is a sort of permanent moral dyspepsia! Never mind the philosophers of the Vedas and the Sankhya. I, Gleb Nerzhin, I myself, a prisoner in harness for five years, have risen by my own efforts to a level of development at which the bad can also be seen as the good, and it is my firm belief that people do not know themselves what they should aspire to. They squander their strength in the pointless scramble for a handful of material goods and die without even discovering their own spiritual riches. When Lev Tolstoy dreamed of being put in prison, he was thinking like a genuinely clear-sighted man with a healthy spiritual life.”
Excerpt From: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. “In the First Circle.” HarperCollins.
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