[But once he got thoroughly cross with Suler. Suler inclined to
anarchism, and often argued with bitterness about the freedom of the
individual. In such cases Leo Nicolayevitch always chaffed him.
I remember that Suler once got hold of a thin little pamphlet by
Prince Kropotkin; he flamed up, and all day long explained to everyone
the wisdom of anarchism, overwhelming them with his philosophizing.
"Oh, stop it, Liovushka," said Leo Nicolayevitch irritably, "you are
annoying. You hammer away like a parrot at one word, freedom, freedom;
but what is the sense of it? If you attained your freedom, what do you
imagine would happen? In the philosophic sense, a bottomless void, and
in actual life you would become an idler, a parasite. If you were free
in your sense, what would bind you to life or to people? Now, birds are
free, but still they build nests; you, however, wouldn't even build a
nest, but would gratify your sexual feeling anywhere, like a dog. You
think seriously, and you will come to see, you will come to feel, that
this freedom is ultimately emptiness, boundlessness."
He frowned angrily, was silent for a while, and then added quietly,
"Christ was free and so was Buddha, and both took on themselves the
sins of the world and voluntarily entered the prison of earthly life.
Further than that nobody has gone, nobody. And you--we--well, what's
the good of talking--we are all looking for freedom from obligations
towards our fellow men, whereas it is just that feeling of our
obligations which has made us men, and, if those obligations were not
there, we should live like the beasts."
He smiled. "And now here we are arguing how we ought to live. The
result isn't very great, but it is something. For instance, you are
arguing with me, and are getting so cross that you are going blue in
the nose, yet you don't hit me, you don't even swear at me. But if you
really felt free, you'd kill me on the spot, and there'd be an end of
it." After a silence, he added: "Freedom consists in all and everything
agreeing with me, but in that case I don't exist, because we are only
conscious of ourselves in conflicts and contradictions,"]