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 again fell back on his pillow. "Why bother? It is all one," he said to himself, gazing into the darkness with open eyes. "Death? Yes, death, and they know nothing about it, and don't want to know, and have no pity. They are playing." (He heard far away, beyond the door, the sound of voices and music.) "It is all one to them, and yet they must die too. The fools! ’Twill be a little sooner for me and a little later for them, that's all; it will be all the same in the end. And they are happy. Brutes!" He was suffocated with rage. And he was in torments and unendurably wretched. "Can it be that everyone is doomed to experience this dreadful anguish?" He got up.

"I ought not to go on like this, I ought to be calm and think over everything from the beginning." And so he began to reflect. "Yes, the disease began like that I bumped my side, and it remained much about the same as before both that day and the day after. Then I had a dull sort of pain, and then it got a little worse, then I had the doctor, and then came low spirits and anguish, and then the doctor again, and all the time I was drawing nearer and nearer to the abyss. My strength begins to fail. Nearer and nearer. And now I dwindle to nothing, and there is no light in my eyes. It is death, and here am I only thinking of my bowels! I am thinking how to set my bowels in order, and it is death that is knocking at my door. Can it really be death?"

And again terror seized him; he panted for breath, bent over and began to search for the candle,