“I understand you, my friend, I understand you perfectly, and I sympathise with you.”

“Really?  Well, then, listen, old man.  I make the last strokes with so much pain, with such a sense of sorrow and hopelessness, as though I were bidding good-bye to the person I loved best of all.  But here I have finished it.  Do you understand what it means?  It means that it has assumed life, that it lives, that there is a certain mysterious spirit in it.  And yet it is already doomed to death, it is dead already, dead like a herring.  Can you understand it at all?  I do not understand it.  And, now, imagine, I—­fool that I am—­I nevertheless rejoice, I cry and rejoice.  No, I think, this picture I shall not destroy; it is so good that I shall not destroy it.  Let it live.  And it is a fact that at such times I do not feel like drawing anything new, I have not the slightest desire for it.  And yet it is dreadful.  Do you understand me?”

“Perfectly, my friend.  No doubt the drawing ceases to please you on the following day—­”

“Oh, what nonsense you are prating, old man! (That is exactly what he said.  ‘Nonsense.’) How can a dying child cease to please you?  Of course, if he lived, he might have become a scoundrel, but when he is dying—­ No, old man, that isn’t it.  For I am killing it myself.  I do not sleep all night long, I jump up, I look at it, and I love it so dearly that I feel like stealing it.  Stealing it from whom?  What do I know?  But when morning sets in I feel that I cannot do without it, that I must take up that cursed pencil again and create anew.  What a mockery!  To create!  What am I, a galley slave?”

“My friend, you are in a prison.”

“My dear old man!  When I begin to steal over to the slate with the sponge in my hand I feel like a murderer.  It happens that I go around it for a day or two.  Do you know, one day I bit off a finger of my right hand so as not to draw any more, but that, of course, was only a trifle, for I started to learn drawing with my left hand.  What is this necessity for creating!  To create by all means, create for suffering—­create with the knowledge that it will all perish!  Do you understand it?”

“Finish it, my friend, don’t be agitated; then I will expound to you my views.”

Unfortunately, my advice hardly reached the ears of K. In one of those paroxysms of despair, which frighten the Warden of our prison, K. began to throw himself about in his bed, tear his clothes, shout and sob, manifesting in general all the symptoms of extreme mortification.  I looked at the sufferings of the unfortunate youth with deep emotion (compared with me he was a youth), vainly endeavouring to hold his fingers which were tearing his clothes.  I knew that for this breach of discipline new incarceration awaited him.

“O, impetuous youth,” I thought when he had grown somewhat calmer, and I was tenderly unfolding his fine hair which had become entangled, “how easily you fall into despair!  A bit of drawing, which may in the end fall into the hands of a dealer in old rags, or a dealer in old bronze and cemented porcelain, can cause you so much suffering!” But, of course, I did not tell this to my youthful friend, striving, as any one should under similar circumstances, not to irritate him by unnecessary contradictions.