and not eternal, but you know why I cherish a partiality for it.  Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.  Indeed, he is summoned without his choice by fortuitous circumstances from non-existence into life . . . what for?  He tries to find out the meaning and object of his existence; he is told nothing, or he is told absurdities; he knocks and it is not opened to him; death comes to him—­also without his choice.  And so, just as in prison men held together by common misfortune feel more at ease when they are together, so one does not notice the trap in life when people with a bent for analysis and generalization meet together and pass their time in the interchange of proud and free ideas.  In that sense the intellect is the source of an enjoyment nothing can replace.”

“Perfectly true.”

Not looking his friend in the face, Andrey Yefimitch would go on, quietly and with pauses, talking about intellectual people and conversation with them, and Mihail Averyanitch would listen attentively and agree:  “Perfectly true.”

“And you do not believe in the immortality of the soul?” he would ask suddenly.

“No, honoured Mihail Averyanitch; I do not believe it, and have no grounds for believing it.”

“I must own I doubt it too.  And yet I have a feeling as though I should never die.  Oh, I think to myself:  ’Old fogey, it is time you were dead!’ But there is a little voice in my soul says:  ’Don’t believe it; you won’t die.’”

Soon after nine o’clock Mihail Averyanitch would go away.  As he put on his fur coat in the entry he would say with a sigh: 

“What a wilderness fate has carried us to, though, really!  What’s most vexatious of all is to have to die here.  Ech! . .”

VII

After seeing his friend out Andrey Yefimitch would sit down at the table and begin reading again.  The stillness of the evening, and afterwards of the night, was not broken by a single sound, and it seemed as though time were standing still and brooding with the doctor over the book, and as though there were nothing in existence but the books and the lamp with the green shade.  The doctor’s coarse peasant-like face was gradually lighted up by a smile of delight and enthusiasm over the progress of the human intellect.  Oh, why is not man immortal? he thought.  What is the good of the brain centres and convolutions, what is the good of sight, speech, self-consciousness, genius, if it is all destined to depart into the soil, and in the end to grow cold together with the earth’s crust, and then for millions of years to fly with the earth round the sun with no meaning and no object?  To do that there was no need at all to draw man with his lofty, almost godlike intellect out of non-existence, and then, as though in mockery, to turn him into clay.