A Confession

Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, wrote the short autobiographical work between 1879 and 1880, in his early fifties, about a mid-life crisis in which the certainty of death drained his life of meaning. He begins with the Eastern fable of a man clinging to a branch in a well above a dragon while two mice gnaw at it, and says he can no longer enjoy the honey that stands for his family and his writing. He weighs four responses: ignorance, Epicurean enjoyment, suicide, and simply holding on, his own course. Finding no answer in philosophy or science, he turns to the faith of ordinary people. William James later discussed it at length in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Jordan B. Peterson included it among the suggested readings for Maps of Meaning.