Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Irina Reyfman (top 10 novels of all time .txt) 📕

were witnesses of how awful an excess of sensual satisfaction is and abhorred it; you were witnesses of the terrible tumult of passions that overflowed the banks of their natural course, recognized their fateful devastation and recoiled. My expertise, watching over you like a new Aegis, protected you from pointless pains. Now you shall be your own pilots, and while my advice will always be a lamp for your own initiatives, since your heart and soul are open to me, but like a light that grows dimmer as it grows distant from the object, so shall you, at a distance from my presence, feel the weak warmth of my friendship. And this is why I shall teach you the rules of private life and civic life so that you shall feel no disgust at activities done in a passionate state once they have subsided, and shall not know the meaning of remorse.

“The rules of private life, insofar as this pertains to you, must relate to your body and morality. Never forget to use your physical powers and your feelings. Their moderate exercise will strengthen but not exhaust them, and will serve to benefit your health and longevity. And for that reason practice in the arts, crafts, and skills that you know. Mastery in them might sometimes be required. The future is unknown to us. Should inimical fortune strip you of everything it has given you, you will be rich in the moderation of your desires, sustained by the work of your hands. But if you neglect to practice in days of happiness, it will be late to think about this during sad times. Luxury, indolence, and the immoderate satisfaction of senses destroy both the body and spirit. For one who exhausts the body through lack of restraint exhausts the strength of the spirit. But use of your strength will reinforce the body and with it the spirit. If you feel an aversion to foodstuffs and illness comes knocking at the door, leap up then from your bed on which you indulge your senses, engage your sleeping limbs in action with exercise, and you will feel an immediate renewal of your strength. Restrain yourself from the food needed when you are healthy and hunger will make sweet the food that tasted bitter when you were full. Remember always that to put hunger to rest, all that is needed is a morsel of bread and ladle of water. If sleep, the beneficial deprivation of external sensations, should depart from the head of your bed and you are unable to renew your mental and physical powers—flee from your halls and once you have wearied your limbs to the point of exhaustion, lie down on your bed and you will fall asleep for the sake of health.

“Be fastidious in your attire, keep your body clean since cleanliness conduces to health while negligence and fetidness of the body open an insidious path to vile vices. But in this too be not immoderate. Do not shirk from helping to raise up a cart stuck in the mud in a ditch and to help someone who has fallen: get your hands, legs, and body dirty but enlighten your heart. Enter the cabins of degradation, comfort one suffering from poverty, taste his victuals, and your heart will be assuaged through giving joy to the sufferer.

“You have reached now, I repeat, that terrible time and hour when the passions begin to awaken, but when reason is still a weak curb on them. For on the scales of will, the tray of reason without experience will rise up but the tray of passions instantaneously drops very low. There is, therefore, no other way to approach equilibrium except by dint of effort. Put your body to work, your passions will not experience so strong a disturbance; put your heart to work by practicing goodness, sensibility, compassion, generosity, forgiveness, and your passions will find a happy issue. Put your reason to work, laboring at reading, reflections, the search for truth and facts, and reason will guide your will and your passions. But do not have the presumption in a fit of reason that you are able to eliminate the roots of the passions and that you can be completely dispassionate. The root of the passions is good and founded by nature on our sensibility. When our senses, external and internal, weaken and become dulled the passions, too, weaken. They produce in man a beneficial disquiet without which he would fall asleep in inertness. An absolutely dispassionate person is a dolt and ludicrous dummy equally incapable of good and evil. There is no merit in holding back from bad designs if you are unable to carry them out. A man missing an arm is unable to wound anyone but nor can he give aid to a drowning man or restrain a man on the shore who falls into the abyss of the sea.—Therefore moderation in passion is a good; progress on the middle path is secure. Excess in passion is fatal, dispassion is moral death. Like the wayfarer who, wandering away from the middle of the path, risks the danger of falling into this or that ditch, so, too, is the pathway for morality. But should your passions be directed toward a positive goal by experience, reason, and the heart, throw off from them the reins of wearying prudence, do not stymie their flight; grandeur will always be their goal, and there only can they come to rest.

“But if I encourage you not to be dispassionate, more important than anything is moderation of erotic passion in your youth. It has been planted in our heart by nature for our pleasure. Hence a mistake can arise in the lack of moderation and the object but never in its coming to life. Take care, therefore not to be mistaken in the object of your love and not to mistake a semblance for mutual ardor. If the object of love is good, you will not know