Recently, perhaps due to life's circumstances, I have been thinking about an old Tolstoy story called How Much Land Does a Man Need? Here it is, more or less the way I remember it.

A peasant named Pahom overhears his wife say that a peasant's life, hard as it is, has one advantage - it's safe. There's no land to lose, so there's nothing to fear, not even the devil. Pahom disagrees. Give me enough land, he thinks, and I wouldn't fear the devil himself. Behind the stove, the devil is listening. He smiles. We'll see about that.

Pahom gets his first plot of land, and for a while it really does feel like paradise. Then neighbors start trespassing, the relationships sour, the peace doesn't hold. He hears about better land somewhere else. More of it, cheaper too. So he sells everything and moves. The new land is good. For a while. Then it isn't enough either.

Word comes of land even further out, out in Bashkir territory, practically free for the asking. He travels hundreds of miles to get there. The Bashkir chief makes him a strange offer: walk as far as you want in a single day, sunrise to sunset, trace any shape you like, and all the land inside that shape is yours. The price is a thousand rubles, barely anything for what he'd gain. Only one rule. He has to make it back to his starting point before the sun sets, or he loses everything. The land, the money, all of it.

That night, Pahom has a dream. A man is lying dead on the ground. He steps closer to look. It's him. The devil is standing over the body, laughing. He wakes up unsettled, then shrugs it off. Just a strange dream.

At dawn he starts walking. The land is better than he imagined, and every stretch of it makes him want a little more. Just past that hill. Just that valley too. Just one more meadow before he turns back. By the time he actually checks the sun, he's gone too far. He starts running. Boots off. Coat thrown to the ground. Lungs burning, heart slamming against his ribs. The sun is touching the horizon as he comes into sight of the starting point. He sprints the last stretch and collapses across the line just as the sun goes down, his hand still reaching for the chief's cap, marking the spot. And he dies there, right as he reaches it.

The chief laughs. What a fine fellow, he says. Look how much land he won. His servants pick up his body and dig him a grave. Six feet, head to heel, was all the land he ever actually needed.

I don't have a tidy lesson to wrap this in. I think it's better left exactly as it is.