Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/81

 rienced those pleasant sensations was no more; it was like a recollection of somebody else.

As soon as there began that which resulted in the present man, in Iván Ilích, everything which then had appeared as joys now melted in his sight and changed into something insignificant and even abominable.

And the farther away from childhood and nearer to the present, the more insignificant and doubtful were the joys. This began with the law school. There had been there something truly good; there had been there merriment, friendship, hopes. But in the upper classes these good minutes had happened more rarely; those were the recollections of the love of woman. Then all got mixed, and there was still less of what was good. Farther on there was still less of what was good, and the farther, the less.

"The marriage—so sudden, and the disenchantment, and the odour from my wife's mouth, and sensuality, and hypocrisy! And this dead service, and these cares about the money, and thus passed a year, and two, and ten, and twenty,—all the time the same. The farther, the deader. It was as though I were going evenly down-hill, imagining that I was going up-hill. And so it was. In public opinion I went up-hill,—and just in that proportion did my life vanish under me.—And now it is all done,—go and die!

"So what is this? Why? Impossible. It cannot be that life should be so senseless and so abominable! And if it has indeed been so abominable and meaningless, what sense is there in dying, and in dying with suffering? Something is wrong.

"Perhaps I did not live the proper way," it suddenly occurred to him. "But how can that be, since I did everything that was demanded of me?" he said to himself, and immediately he repelled from himself this only solution of the whole enigma of life and of death, as something totally impossible.