others. It seemed to me that the narrow circle of learned, rich, leisured people, to which I belonged, formed all humanity, and that those billions of men who had lived and were living then were just a kind of animals, and not men.
No matter how strange, how incredibly incomprehensible it now seems to me that I, discussing life, should have been able to overlook all those who surrounded me on all sides, the life of humanity, that I should have been able to err in such a ridiculous manner as to think that my life, and the life of a Solomon and a Schopenhauer, was the real, the normal life, while the life of billions was a circumstance that did not deserve consideration,—no matter how strange that all appears to me now, it was nevertheless so. In the aberration of my pride of mind, it seemed to me so incontestable that Solomon, Schopenhauer, and I had put the question so correctly and so truly that there could be nothing else,—it seemed so incontestable to me that all those billions belonged to those who had not yet reached the whole depth of the question,—that in looking for the meaning of life I never thought: “What meaning have all those billions, who have lived in the world, ascribed to their life?”
I lived for a long time in this madness, which, not in words, but in deeds, is particularly characteristic of us, the most liberal and learned of men. But, thanks either to my strange, physical love for the real working class, which made me understand it and see that it is not so stupid as we suppose, or to the sincerity of my conviction, which was that I could know nothing and that the best that I could do was to hang myself,—I felt that if I wanted to live and understand the meaning of life, I ought naturally to look for it, not among those who had lost the meaning of life and wanted to kill themselves, but among those billions departed and living men who
