Page 576 - the-idiot

had four weeks to live, but only partially so at that time. The
idea quite overmastered me three days since, that evening
at Pavlofsk. The first time that I felt really impressed with
this thought was on the terrace at the prince’s, at the very
moment when I had taken it into my head to make a last
trial of life. I wanted to see people and trees (I believe I said
so myself), I got excited, I maintained Burdovsky’s rights,
‘my neighbour!’—I dreamt that one and all would open their
arms, and embrace me, that there would be an indescrib-
able exchange of forgiveness between us all! In a word, I
behaved like a fool, and then, at that very same instant, I
felt my ‘last conviction.’ I ask myself now how I could have
waited six months for that conviction! I knew that I had a
disease that spares no one, and I really had no illusions; but
the more I realized my condition, the more I clung to life;
I wanted to live at any price. I confess I might well have re-
sented that blind, deaf fate, which, with no apparent reason,
seemed to have decided to crush me like a fly; but why did
I not stop at resentment? Why did I begin to live, knowing
that it was not worthwhile to begin? Why did I attempt to
do what I knew to be an impossibility? And yet I could not
even read a book to the end; I had given up reading. What is
the good of reading, what is the good of learning anything,
for just six months? That thought has made me throw aside
a book more than once.
‘Yes, that wall of Meyer’s could tell a tale if it liked. There
was no spot on its dirty surface that I did not know by heart.
Accursed wall! and yet it is dearer to me than all the Pav-
lofsk trees!—That is—it WOULD be dearer if it were not all