Itinerantdaughter's Blog

Reason #779:

” ‘Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes,’ though Levin about his wife, as he talked to her that night.

“Levin thought of the Gospel text not because he considered himself wise and prudent.  He did not, but he could not help knowing that he was more intelligent than his wife and Agafya, and he could not help knowing that when he thought about death he thought with all his heart and soul.  He knew, too, that many men of great intellect, whose thoughts on death he had read, had pondered deeply about it and did not know a hundredth part of what his wife and Agafya knew.  Different as those two women were, Agafya and Katya, as his brother Nikolai called Kitty and as Levin particularly liked to call her now, were absolutely alike in this.  Both knew without any doubt whatever what was life and what was death, and though they could not possibly have answered or even have understood the questions that presented themselves to Levin, neither of them had any doubts about the significance of these phenomena and both looked upon them in the same way, sharing this view with millions of other people.  The proof that they knew firmly what death was lay in the fact that they never doubted for a moment how to deal with the dying and had no fear of death.  Levin, however, and others like him, though they could say a great deal about death, quite obviously did not know, because they were afraid of death and had not the faintest idea what to do when people were dying.  Had Levin now been alone with his brother Nikolai, he would have looked at him with terror and would have sat waiting there in still greater terror, and that would have been all he could do.”

~Guess