The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy/Volume 18/The Death of Iván Ílich/Chapter 10
X.
Two more weeks passed. Iván Ilích no longer rose from his divan. He did not want to lie in his bed, and lay on the divan. Lying nearly all the time with his face to the wall, he suffered in loneliness the same insoluble sufferings, and in loneliness thought the same insoluble thought. "What is this? Is this really death?" And an inner voice answered him: "Yes, it is." "What are these torments for?" and the voice answered: "For no special reason." After that and outside of that there was nothing.
From the very beginning of his sickness, from the first time that he went to see the doctor, his life was divided into two opposite moods which gave way to one another: now it was despair and the expectancy of incredible and terrible death, and now hope and an absorbing observation of the activity of his body. Now there was before his eyes nothing but his kidney or gut, which had for the time being deflected from the fulfilment of its obligations, and now it was the one incomprehensible, terrible death, from which it was impossible to be freed in any way whatever.
These two moods alternated from the very beginning of his sickness; but the farther his disease proceeded, the more doubtful and fantastic did his imagination grow in respect to the kidney, and the more real came to be the consciousness of impending death.
He needed but to recall what he had been three months before and what he now was, to recall how evenly he had been going down-hill, in order that every possibility of hope should be destroyed.
During the last stage of the loneliness in which he was, lying with his face turned to the back of the divan, of that loneliness amidst a populous city and his numerous acquaintances and his family,—a loneliness fuller than which can nowhere be found,—neither at the bottom of the sea, nor in the earth,—during the last stages of this terrible loneliness Iván Ilích lived in his imagination only in the past. One after another there arose before him pictures of his past. They always began with what was nearest in time and ran back to what was most remote, to childhood, and there they stopped. If Iván Ilích thought of the stewed prunes which he was offered to-day to eat, he recalled the raw, wrinkled French prunes of his childhood, their particular taste, and the abundance of saliva when he reached the stone, and side by side with this recollection of the taste there arose a whole series of recollections from that time,—the nurse, the brother, the toys.
"I must not think of this,—it is too painful," Iván Ilích said to himself, and again transferred himself to the present. A button on the back of the divan and wrinkles in the morocco. The morocco is expensive,—not durable,—there was a quarrel on account of it. It was a different kind of morocco, and a different quarrel, when we tore father's portfolio, and were punished, and mother brought us patties." And again his thoughts stopped at his childhood, and again he felt a pain, and tried to dispel it and to think of something else.
And again, together with this train of his recollections, another train of recollections passed through his soul as to how his disease increased and grew. Again it was the same: the farther back, the more there was of life. There was more good in life and more of life itself. Both blended.
"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?"