Page 579 - the-idiot

they please. They may say it is all fairy-tales, if they like;
and I have spent whole nights telling myself fairy-tales. I
remember them all. But how can I tell fairy-tales now? The
time for them is over. They amused me when I found that
there was not even time for me to learn the Greek gram-
mar, as I wanted to do. ‘I shall die before I get to the syntax,’
I thought at the first page—and threw the book under the
table. It is there still, for I forbade anyone to pick it up.
‘If this ‘Explanation’ gets into anybody’s hands, and they
have patience to read it through, they may consider me a
madman, or a schoolboy, or, more likely, a man condemned
to die, who thought it only natural to conclude that all men,
excepting himself, esteem life far too lightly, live it far too
carelessly and lazily, and are, therefore, one and all, unwor-
thy of it. Well, I affirm that my reader is wrong again, for my
convictions have nothing to do with my sentence of death.
Ask them, ask any one of them, or all of them, what they
mean by happiness! Oh, you may be perfectly sure that if
Columbus was happy, it was not after he had discovered
America, but when he was discovering it! You may be quite
sure that he reached the culminating point of his happiness
three days before he saw the New World with his actual
eves, when his mutinous sailors wanted to tack about, and
return to Europe! What did the New World matter after all?
Columbus had hardly seen it when he died, and in reality
he was entirely ignorant of what he had discovered. The im-
portant thing is life— life and nothing else! What is any
‘discovery’ whatever compared with the incessant, eternal
discovery of life?

The Idiot