I shall say, 'Basil, I know that you love her, and that she loves you.
Here are a thousand roubles for you. Marry her, and may God grant you
both happiness!' Then I shall leave them together.'
Among the countless thoughts and fancies which pass, without logic or
sequence, through the mind and the imagination, there are always some
which leave behind them a mark so profound that, without remembering
their exact subject, we can at least recall that something good has
passed through our brain, and try to retain and reproduce its effect.
Such was the mark left upon my consciousness by the idea of sacrificing
my feelings to Masha's happiness, seeing that she believed that she
could attain it only through a union with Basil.
XIX. BOYHOOD
PERHAPS people will scarcely believe me when I tell them what were the
dearest, most constant, objects of my reflections during my boyhood, so
little did those objects consort with my age and position. Yet, in my
opinion, contrast between a man's actual position and his moral activity
constitutes the most reliable sign of his genuineness.
During the period when I was leading a solitary and self-centred moral
life, I was much taken up with abstract thoughts on man's destiny, on
a future life, and on the immortality of the soul, and, with all the
ardour of inexperience, strove to make my youthful intellect solve those
questions--the questions which constitute the highest level of thought
to which the human intellect can tend, but a final decision of which the
human intellect can never succeed in attaining.
I believe the intellect to take the same course of development in the
individual as in the mass, as also that the thoughts which serve as
a basis for philosophical theories are an inseparable part of that
intellect, and that every man must be more or less conscious of those
thoughts before he can know anything of the existence of philosophical
theories. To my own mind those thoughts presented themselves with such
clarity and force that I tried to apply them to life, in the fond belief
that I was the first to have discovered such splendid and invaluable
truths.
Sometimes I would suppose that happiness depends, not upon external
causes themselves, but only upon our relation to them, and that,
provided a man can accustom himself to bearing suffering, he need
never be unhappy. To prove the latter hypothesis, I would (despite the
horrible pain) hold out a Tatistchev's dictionary at arm's length for
five minutes at a time, or else go into the store-room and scourge my
back with cords until the tears involuntarily came to my eyes!
Another time, suddenly bethinking me that death might find me at any
hour or any minute, I came to the conclusion that man could only be
happy by using the present to the full and taking no thought for the
future. Indeed, I wondered how people had never found that out before.
Acting under the influence of the new idea, I laid my lesson-books
aside for two or three days, and, reposing on my bed, gave myself up to
novel-reading and the eating of gingerbread-and-honey which I had bought
with my last remaining coins.
Again, standing one day before the blackboard and smearing figures on it
with honey, I was struck with the thought, 'Why is symmetry so agreeable
to the eye? What is symmetry? Of course it is an innate sense,' I
continued; 'yet what is its basis? Perhaps everything in life is
symmetry? But no. On the contrary, this is life'--and I drew an oblong
figure on the board--'and after life the soul passes to eternity'--here
