Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 31
never thought about it, and what was more, had not the power, had not the courage
to think about it.
“I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had
forgotten–death.”
He sat on his bed in the darkness, crouched up, hugging his knees, and holding his
breath from the strain of thought, he pondered. But the more intensely he thought,
the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that in reality, looking upon
life, he had forgotten one little fact–that death will come, and all ends; that nothing
was even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes, it was
awful, but it was so.
“But I am alive still. Now what’s to be done? what’s to be done?” he said in
despair. He lighted a candle, got up cautiously and went to the looking-glass, and
began looking at his face and hair. Yes, there were gray hairs about his temples. He
opened his mouth. His back teeth were beginning to decay. He bared his muscular
arms. Yes, there was strength in them. But Nikolay, who lay there breathing with
what was left of lungs, had had a strong, healthy body too. And suddenly he recalled
how they used to go to bed together as children, and how they only waited
till Fyodor Bogdanitch was out of the room to fling pillows at each other and laugh,
laugh irrepressibly, so that even their awe of Fyodor Bogdanitch could not check the
effervescing, overbrimming sense of life and happiness. “And now that bent, hollow
chest...and I, not knowing what will become of me, or wherefore...”
“K...ha! K...ha! Damnation! Why do you keep fidgeting, why don’t you go to
sleep?” his brother’s voice called to him.
“Oh, I don’t know, I’m not sleepy.”
“I have had a good sleep, I’m not in a sweat now. Just see, feel my shirt; it’s not
wet, is it?”
Levin felt, withdrew behind the screen, and put out the candle, but for a long
while he could not sleep. The question how to live had hardly begun to grow a little
clearer to him, when a new, insoluble question presented itself–death.
“Why, he’s dying–yes, he’ll die in the spring, and how help him? What can I say
to him? What do I know about it? I’d even forgotten that it was at all.”
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