{"id":138934,"date":"2019-08-12T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2019-08-12T11:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=138934"},"modified":"2019-07-29T09:38:55","modified_gmt":"2019-07-29T08:38:55","slug":"leo-tolstoy-on-kindness-and-the-measure-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/08\/leo-tolstoy-on-kindness-and-the-measure-of-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Leo Tolstoy on Kindness and the Measure of Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cNothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cPractice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you\u2019re already in heaven now,\u201d Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful letter<\/a> to his first wife and lifelong friend. Somehow, despite our sincerest intentions, we repeatedly fall short of this earthly divinity, so readily available yet so easily elusive. And yet in our culture, it has been aptly observed, \u201cwe are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.\u201d<\/a> In his stirring Syracuse commencement address<\/a>, George Saunders confessed with unsentimental ruefulness: \u201cWhat I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.\u201d I doubt any decent person, upon candid reflection, would rank any other species of regret higher. To be human is to leap toward our highest moral potentialities, only to trip over the foibled actualities of our reflexive patterns. To be a good human is to keep leaping anyway.<\/p>\n

In the middle of his fifty-fifth year, Leo Tolstoy<\/strong> (September 9, 1828\u2013November 20, 1910) set out to construct a reliable springboard for these moral leaps by compiling \u201ca wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people,\u201d whose wisdom \u201cgives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness\u201d \u2014 thinkers and spiritual leaders who have shed light on what is most important in living a rewarding and meaningful life. Such a book, Tolstoy envisioned, would tell a person \u201cabout the Good Way of Life.\u201d He spent the next seventeen years on the project.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Leo Tolstoy<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1902, by then seriously ill and facing his own mortality, Tolstoy finally completed the manuscript under the working title A Wise Thought for Every Day<\/em>. It was published two years later, in Russian, but it took nearly a century for the first English translation, by Peter Sekirin<\/strong>, to appear: A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World\u2019s Sacred Texts<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>). For each day of the year, Tolstoy had selected several quotes by great thinkers around a particular theme, then contributed his own thoughts on the subject, with kindness as the pillar of the book\u2019s moral sensibility.<\/p>\n

Perhaps prompted by the creaturely severity and the clenching of heart induced by winter\u2019s coldest, darkest days, or perhaps by the renewed resolve for moral betterment with which we face each new year, he writes in the entry for January 7:<\/p>\n

The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people. <\/em><\/p>\n

Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy, and dull things become cheerful.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the end of the month, in a sentiment Carl Sagan would come to echo in his lovely invitation to meet ignorance with kindness<\/a>, Tolstoy writes:<\/p>\n

You should respond with kindness toward evil done to you, and you will destroy in an evil person that pleasure which he derives from evil.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf by Nadine Brun-Cosme.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the entry for February 3, he revisits the subject:<\/p>\n

Kindness is for your soul as health is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After copying out two kindness-related quotations from Jeremy Bentham (\u201cA person becomes happy to the same extent to which he or she gives happiness to other people.\u201d) and John Ruskin (\u201cThe will of God for us is to live in happiness and to take an interest in the lives of others.\u201d), Tolstoy adds:<\/p>\n

Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love, and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. This is the foundation of the world.<\/em><\/p>\n

Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Feast on more of Tolstoy\u2019s deeply nourishing Calendar of Wisdom<\/em> here<\/a>. Complement this particular fragment with Albert Einstein on the meaning of kindness<\/a>, Jacqueline Woodson\u2019s lovely letter to children about kindness<\/a>, and Naomi Shihab Nye on the remarkable true story behind her beloved poem \u201cKindness,\u201d<\/a> then revisit Tolstoy on love and its paradoxical demands<\/a>, his early diaries of moral development<\/a>, and his deathbed writings on what gives meaning to our lives<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired<\/em> UK and <\/em>The Atlantic<\/em>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>. Email: brainpicker@brainpickings.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cNothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness. Kindness is for your soul as health is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":138936,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[1318],"class_list":["post-138934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-leo-tolstoy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}