He sat on his bed in the darkness, crouched up, hugging his knees, and, holding his breath from the strain of thought, he pondered. But the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that, in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten one little fact - that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes, it was awful, but it was so.
`But I am alive still. What's to be done now - what's to be done?'
he asked in despair. He lighted a candle, got up cautiously, went to the looking glass, and began looking at his face and hair. Yes, there were gray hairs about his temples. He opened his mouth. His back teeth were beginning to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, there was strength in them. But Nikolenka, who lay there breathing with what was left of his lungs, had had a strong, healthy body too. And suddenly he recalled how they used to go to bed together as children, and how they only waited till Fiodor Bogdanich was out of the room to fling pillows at each other and laugh, laugh irrepressibly, so that even their awe of Fiodor Bogdanich could not check the effervescing, overbrimming sense of life and happiness.
`And now that warped, hollow chest... And I, not knowing what will become of me, or wherefore....'
`K-ha! K-ha! Damnation! Why do you keep fidgeting - why don't you go to sleep?' his brother's voice called to him.
`Oh, I don't know; I'm not sleepy.'
`I have had a good sleep, I'm not in a sweat now. Just see, feel my shirt - there's no sweat, is there?'
Levin felt it, withdrew behind the partition, and put out the candle, but for a long while he could not sleep. The question how to live had hardly begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a new, insolvable question presented itself - death.
`Why, he's dying - yes, he'll die in the spring; and how is one to help him? What can I say to him? What do I know about it? I'd even forgotten the very fact of it.'
[Next Chapter] [Table of Contents]TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 3, Chapter 32[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 32 Levin had long before made the observation that when one is uncomfortable with people from their being excessively amenable and meek, one is apt very soon after to find things intolerable from their pretensions and irritability.
He felt that this was how it would be with his brother. And his brother Nikolai's gentleness did not, in fact, last out for long. The very next morning he began to be irritable, and seemed doing his best to find fault with his brother, attacking him on his tenderest points.
Levin felt himself to blame, and could not set things right. He felt that if they had both not kept up appearances, but had spoken, as it is called, from the heart - that is to say, had said only just what they were thinking and feeling - they would simply have looked into each other's faces, and Konstantin could only have said: `You're dying, you're dying,' and Nikolai could only have answered: `I know I'm dying, but I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid!' And they could have said nothing more, if they had said only what was in their hearts. But life like that was impossible, and so Konstantin tried to do what he had been trying to do all his life, and never could learn to do, though, as far as he could observe, many people knew so well how to do it, and without it there was no living at all. He tried to say what he was not thinking, but he felt continually that it had a ring of falsehood, that his brother detected him in it, and was exasperated at it.
The third day Nikolai induced his brother to explain his plan to him again, and began not merely attacking it, but intentionally confounding it with communism.
`You've simply borrowed an idea that's not your own, but you've distorted it, and are trying to apply it where it's not applicable.'
`But I tell you there's nothing in common. They deny the justice of property, of capital, of inheritance, while I do not deny this chief stimulus.' (Levin felt disgusted himself at using such expressions, but ever since he had been engrossed by his work, he had unconsciously come more and more frequently to use non-Russian words.) `All I want is to regulate labor.'