"I once saw him as, perhaps, no one has ever
seen him. I was walking over to him at Gaspra along the coast, and behind
Yussupor’s estate, on the shore among the stones I saw his smallish, angular
figure in a gray, crumpled, ragged suit and crumpled hat. He was sitting with
his head on his hands, the wind blowing the silvery hairs of his beard through
his fingers: he was looking into the distance out to sea, and the little
greenish waves rolled up obediently to his feet and fondled them as they were
telling something about themselves to the old magician. It was a day of sun and
cloud, and the shadows of the clouds glided over the stones, and with the
stones the old man grew now bright and now dark. The bowlders were large, riven
by cracks and covered with smelly seaweed; there had been a high tide. He, too,
seemed to me like an old stone come to life, who knows all the beginnings and
the ends of things, who considers when and what will be the end of the stone,
of the grasses of the earth, of the waters of the sea, and of the whole
universe from the pebble to the sun. And the sea is part of his soul, and
everything around him comes from him, out of him. In the musing motionlessness
of the old man I felt something fateful, magical, something which went down
into the darkness beneath him and stretched up like a search-light into the
blue emptiness above the earth; as though it were he, his concentrated will,
which was drawing the waves to him and repelling them, which was ruling the
movements of cloud and shadow, which was stirring the stones to life. Suddenly,
in a moment of madness, I felt, “It is possible, he will get up, wave his hand,
and the sea will become solid and glassy, the stones will begin to move and cry
out, everything around him will come to life, acquire a voice, and speak in
their different voices of themselves, of him, against him.” I cannot express in
words what I felt rather than thought at that moment; in my soul there was joy
and fear, and then everything blended in one happy thought: “I am not an orphan
on the earth, so long as this man lives on it.”
“Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy” By Maxim
Gorky
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