Translations:Yirmi Altıncı Lem'a/293/en

When I was twenty years old I used to say repeatedly: “Towards the end of my life I shall withdraw from the life of society into a cave or onto a mountain like the people of olden times who abandoned the world and withdrew into caves.” Then when in the Great War I was being held as a prisoner in the north-east, I took this decision: “After this I shall spend my life in caves. I shall slip away from political and social life. Enough now of mixing in them.” At that point both dominical grace and the justice of divine determining were manifested. It transformed the caves I had imagined into prisons, places of seclusion, loneliness in places of ordeal and solitar y confinement in a way far better than my decision and wish, compassionately for my old age.It bestowed on me Schools of Joseph and places of solitary confinement where my time would not be wasted that were far superior to the mountain caves of ascetics and recluses.