Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/85

 "Just as my suffering is growing worse and worse, so my whole life has been getting worse and worse," he thought. There was one bright point there behind, in the beginning of life, and then everything grows blacker and blacker, and goes faster and faster. "In inverse proportion to the square of the distance from death," thought Iván Ilích. And this representation of a stone flying downward with increasing rapidity fell into his soul. Life, a series of increasing sufferings, flew more and more rapidly toward its end, a most terrible suffering. "I fly—" He trembled, and shook, and wanted to resist; but he knew that it was useless to resist, and again he looked at the back of the divan with eyes weary from looking, which could not help but look at what was in front of him, and he waited and waited for that terrible fall, push, and destruction.

"It is impossible to resist," he said to himself. "But if I only understood what it is all for. And this is impossible. One might be able to explain it, if it could be said that I had not lived properly. But that can by no means be asserted," he said to himself, as he recalled all the lawfulness, regularity, and decency of his life. "It is impossible to admit this," he said to himself, smiling with his lips, as though some one could see this smile of his and be deceived by it. "There is no explanation! Torment, death— Why?"