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meddle in that, I didn’t create it, I am not answerable for it.
Well, they’ve chosen their scapegoat, they’ve made me write
the column of criticism and so life was made possible. We
understand that comedy; I, for instance, simply ask for an-
nihilation. No, live, I am told, for there’d be nothing without
you. If everything in the universe were sensible, nothing
would happen. There would be no events without you, and
there must be events. So against the grain I serve to produce
events and do what’s irrational because I am commanded to.
For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as
something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of
course... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantas-
tic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would
be the pleasure of it? It would be transformed into an end-
less church service; it would be holy, but tedious. But what
about me? I suffer, but still, I don’t live. I am x in an inde-
terminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has
lost all beginning and end, and who has even forgotten his
own name. You are laughing- no, you are not laughing, you
are angry again. You are for ever angry, all you care about
is intelligence, but I repeat again that I would give away all
this superstellar life, all the ranks and honours, simply to
be transformed into the soul of a merchant’s wife weighing
eighteen stone and set candles at God’s shrine.’
‘Then even you don’t believe in God?’ said Ivan, with a
smile of hatred.
‘What can I say? — that is, if you are in earnest-.’
‘Is there a God or not?’ Ivan cried with the same savage
intensity.

10 The Brothers Karamazov