Page 580 - the-idiot

‘But what is the use of talking? I’m afraid all this is so
commonplace that my confession will be taken for a school-
boy exercise—the work of some ambitious lad writing in
the hope of his work ‘seeing the light’; or perhaps my read-
ers will say that ‘I had perhaps something to say, but did not
know how to express it.’
‘Let me add to this that in every idea emanating from
genius, or even in every serious human idea—born in the
human brain—there always remains something—some
sediment—which cannot be expressed to others, though
one wrote volumes and lectured upon it for five-and-thir-
ty years. There is always a something, a remnant, which
will never come out from your brain, but will remain there
with you, and you alone, for ever and ever, and you will die,
perhaps, without having imparted what may be the very es-
sence of your idea to a single living soul.
‘So that if I cannot now impart all that has tormented
me for the last six months, at all events you will understand
that, having reached my ‘last convictions,’ I must have paid
a very dear price for them. That is what I wished, for reasons
of my own, to make a point of in this my ‘Explanation.’
‘But let me resume.