4 ideas
Before he was fifty, while he had fame, wealth, a happy family and good health, Tolstoy kept being stopped by the question of what would come of his whole life, and he could not answer it. He hid a cord so he would not hang himself from the crossbar between the cupboards in his room, and he stopped taking his gun out hunting. He stresses that this happened when, by every outward measure, his life was going well.
Tolstoy retells an Eastern fable. A traveler flees a wild beast into a dry well, sees a dragon waiting at the bottom, and hangs from a branch while a black mouse and a white mouse (night and day) gnaw through its stem. He licks drops of honey from the leaves. Tolstoy says that once he saw the dragon and the mice clearly, the honey of family and art stopped tasting sweet, because a pleasure cannot distract a person who has fully seen that death is certain.
Tolstoy sorts the responses of his educated class to life's apparent pointlessness into four kinds. The first is ignorance: not seeing the problem, as the young and the dull do. The second is epicureanism: seeing it and taking the honey anyway. The third is strength: ending life once its futility is understood. The fourth is weakness: seeing the futility yet living on without acting, which is the category he admits he was in.
Tolstoy finds that science gives exact answers only to questions that leave life's meaning aside, and that honest philosophy (Socrates, Schopenhauer, Solomon, Buddha) mostly restates the question. He then corrects his earlier conclusion that reason proves life evil: because the question asks what meaning a finite life has that death cannot destroy, reason, which cannot connect the finite to the infinite, gives an indeterminate answer rather than a verdict. He turns instead to the faith he sees lived by working peasants, which relates finite life to the infinite.