| "'It doesn't matter. I'll unravel it - I have a solution all ready. But I have no time now - I'll think it out later.' But that later never came.
In the morning, on an empty stomach, all the old questions appeared as insoluble as ever, and Pierre hastily snatched up a book, and was delighted if someone came to see him.
Sometimes he remembered having heard that soldiers in a shelter under enemy fire, when they have nothing to do, make every effort to find some occupation the more easily to endure the danger. And it seemed to Pierre that all men were like these soldiers, seeking a refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards, some in women, in wine, in playthings, horses, sport, and some in politics or government affairs....
But the very thing that had obsessed him in the old days, that he had continually sought in vain - the aim of life - did not exist for him now. That quest for the purpose of life had not been terminated fortuitously or temporarily; he felt that it no longer existed for him, and could not present itself again. And this very absence of an aim gave him the complete, joyous sense of freedom that constituted his happiness at this time.
He could have no aim, for he now had faith - not faith in any sort of rule, or words, or ideas, but faith in a living, perpetually manifest God; formerly he had sought Him in aims he had set himself. That search for an aim had been simply a search for God, and suddenly, in his captivity, he had learned not by words or reasoning, but by direct feeling, what his nurse had told him long ago; that God is here and everywhere. In his captivity he had learned that in Karatayev God was greater, more infinite and unfathomable, than in the Architect of the Universe that the Freemasons acknowledged. He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes.
In the past he had been unable to see the great, the unfathomable, the infinite, in anything. He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and had been seeking it. In everything near and comprehensible he had seen only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and meaningless. He had equipped himself with a mental telescope and gazed into the distance where the petty and the commonplace that were hidden in the mists of distance had seemed to him great and infinite only because they were not clearly visible. Such had European life, politics, Masonry, philosophy, and philanthropy seemed to him. But even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted them, his mind had penetrated that distance too, and he had seen there the same triviality, worldliness, and absurdity.
Now, however, he had learned to see the great, the eternal, the infinite in everything, and therefore, in order to look at it, to enjoy his contemplation of it, he naturally discarded the telescope through which he had till then been gazing over the heads of men, and joyfully surveyed the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked, the happier and more serene he was. The awful question: What for? which had shattered all his intellectual edifices in the past, no longer existed for him. To that question: What for? a simple answer was now always ready in his soul: Because there is a God, that God without whose will not one hair of a man's head falls."
-War and Peace
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