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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: renounce all thought of benefit from the property which you have
acquired. Sincerely do I assure you that, were I myself to be deprived
of my property (and my property greatly exceeds yours in magnitude), I
should not shed a single tear. It is not the property of which men can
deprive us that matters, but the property of which no one on earth can
deprive or despoil us. You are a man who has seen something of
life--to use your own words, you have been a barque tossed hither and
thither by tempestuous waves: yet still will there be left to you a
remnant of substance on which to live, and therefore I beseech you to
settle down in some quiet nook where there is a church, and where none
but plain, good-hearted folk abide. Or, should you feel a yearning to
Dead Souls |
