#war&peace

"While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned, not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth-that there is nothing in the world that is terrible. He had learned that, as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and not free. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together, that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the other was warming, and that when he had put on tight dancing shoes he had suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet that were covered with sores-his footgear having long since fallen to pieces. He discovered that when he had married his wife of his own free will as it had seemed to him- he had been no more free than now when they locked him up at night in a stable. Of all that he himself subsequently termed his sufferings, but which at the time he scarcely felt, the worst was the state of his bare, rubbed, and scab-covered feet. (The horseflesh was appetising and nourishing, the saltpetre flavour of the gunpowder they used instead of salt was even pleasant; there was no great cold, it was always warm walking in the daytime, and at night there were the camp-fires; the lice that devoured him warmed his body.)"

The Conflict of Interest.