When daylight comes I sit up in bed with my arms round my knees, and to pass the time I try to know myself.  “Know thyself” is excellent and useful advice; it is only a pity that the ancients never thought to indicate the means of following this precept.

When I have wanted to understand somebody or myself I have considered, not the actions, in which everything is relative, but the desires.

“Tell me what you want, and I will tell you what manner of man you are.”

And now I examine myself:  what do I want?

I want our wives, our children, our friends, our pupils, to love in us, not our fame, not the brand and not the label, but to love us as ordinary men.  Anything else?  I should like to have had helpers and successors.  Anything else?  I should like to wake up in a hundred years’ time and to have just a peep out of one eye at what is happening in science.  I should have liked to have lived another ten years...  What further?  Why, nothing further.  I think and think, and can think of nothing more.  And however much I might think, and however far my thoughts might travel, it is clear to me that there is nothing vital, nothing of great importance in my desires.  In my passion for science, in my desire to live, in this sitting on a strange bed, and in this striving to know myself—­in all the thoughts, feelings, and ideas I form about everything, there is no common bond to connect it all into one whole.  Every feeling and every thought exists apart in me; and in all my criticisms of science, the theatre, literature, my pupils, and in all the pictures my imagination draws, even the most skilful analyst could not find what is called a general idea, or the god of a living man.

And if there is not that, then there is nothing.

In a state so poverty-stricken, a serious ailment, the fear of death, the influences of circumstance and men were enough to turn upside down and scatter in fragments all which I had once looked upon as my theory of life, and in which I had seen the meaning and joy of my existence.  So there is nothing surprising in the fact that I have over-shadowed the last months of my life with thoughts and feelings only worthy of a slave and barbarian, and that now I am indifferent and take no heed of the dawn.  When a man has not in him what is loftier and mightier than all external impressions a bad cold is really enough to upset his equilibrium and make him begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog howling in every sound.  And all his pessimism or optimism with his thoughts great and small have at such times significance as symptoms and nothing more.

I am vanquished.  If it is so, it is useless to think, it is useless to talk.  I will sit and wait in silence for what is to come.

In the morning the corridor attendant brings me tea and a copy of the local newspaper.  Mechanically I read the advertisements on the first page, the leading article, the extracts from the newspapers and journals, the chronicle of events....  In the latter I find, among other things, the following paragraph:  “Our distinguished savant, Professor Nikolay Stepanovitch So-and-so, arrived yesterday in Harkov, and is staying in the So-and-so Hotel.”