10 Rules for Life from a master writer (no, not me) －文壇の巨匠が贈る人生の10のルール （いいえ、僕ではありません）－

Last week I wrote about my own resolution for this year.  It is a very modest resolution.  But perhaps it is better to go the other way, and set very high or stringent goals for yourself.  I found a great figure in history who did that when he was only 18.

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, or the writer Leo Tolstoy, had a very interesting life.  He wrote some of the best known and best regarded works of literature in history, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina.  He served as an officer in the Crimean War.  He was a Russian aristocrat, who lived in relative luxury and with wild abandon, fathering a child with one of the peasants on his estate in his youth.  He then had a moral crisis and came to see the aristocracy as a burden on the poor.  He tried to live simply, working as a farmer, dressing as a peasant and becoming a vegetarian.  He became a pacifist and anarchist, inspiring Mohandas Ghandi with his ideals of passive resistance to evil.  He fathered a further 13 children with his wife and died at the age of 82 in 1910.

Can you see any hint of the life he had to come in these rules for life, or resolutions, that he wrote when he was just 18? 

Extract from Tolstoy’s Rules for Life:

-Get up early (five o’clock)
-Go to bed early (nine to ten o’clock)
-Eat little and avoid sweets
-Try to do everything by yourself
-Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater
-Keep away from women
-Kill desire by work
-Be good, but try to let no one know it
-Always live less expensively than you might
-Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer

Vocabulary:

to be stringent – To be strict, without giving much room for compromise or leniency.  We often use this word with rules or requirements.

to be well regarded – To be well thought of.  To be praised by others.

an aristocrat – A nobleman or noblewoman.  Someone born into an elite position in society.

to live with wild abandon – To live without regard to rules or moral restrictions.

a peasant – The lowest class of people who lived in the countryside in old Europe.  Peasants in Russia were owned by the aristocracy until the 19^th Century.

to be a burden on someone – To make life more difficult for someone; to require them to support you with money or other help.

a pacifist – Someone who believes that violence is unacceptable in any circumstances; someone who opposes all wars.

an anarchist – Someone who opposes all forms of government; someone who believes that people should exist without an organised government.

passive resistance – Ghandi in India and later Martin Luther King in America used passive resistance to make changes in their societies.  Passive resistance means using non-violent methods to protest.

an extract – A short piece of a longer work