ce between the brain of a Kant
and the brain of a fly was of no real significance, that no one in
this world is righteous or guilty, that everything was stuff and
nonsense and damn it all! I lived as though I were doing a favour
to some unseen power which compelled me to live, and to which I
seemed to say: 'Look, I don't care a straw for life, but I am
living!' I thought on one definite line, but in all sorts of keys,
and in that respect I was like the subtle gourmand who could prepare
a hundred appetising dishes from nothing but potatoes. There is no
doubt that I was one-sided and even to some extent narrow, but I
fancied at the time that my intellectual horizon had neither beginning
nor end, and that my thought was as boundless as the sea. Well, as
far as I can judge by myself, the philosophy of which we are speaking
has something alluring, narcotic in its nature, like tobacco or
morphia. It becomes a habit, a craving. You take advantage of every
minute of solitude to gloat over thoughts of the aimlessness of
life and the darkness of the grave. While I was sitting in the
summer-house, Greek children with long noses were decorously walking
about the avenues. I took advantage of the occasion and, looking
at them, began reflecting in this style:

"'Why are these children born, and what are they living for? Is
there any sort of meaning in their existence? They grow up, without
themselves knowing what for; they will live in this God-forsaken,
comfortless hole for no sort of reason, and then they will die. . . .'

"And I actually felt vexed with those children because they were
walking about decorously and talking with dignity, as though they
did not hold their little colourless lives so cheap and knew what
they were living for. . . . I remember that far away at the end of
an avenue three feminine figures came into sight. Three young ladies,
one in a pink dress, two in white, were walking arm-in-arm, talking
and laughing. Looking after them, I thought:

"'It wouldn't be bad to have an affair with some woman for a couple
of days in this dull place.'

"I recalled by the way that it was three weeks since I had visited
my Petersburg lady, and thought that a passing love affair would
come in very appropriately for me just now. The young lady in white
in the middle was rather younger and better looking than her
companions, and judging by her manners and her laugh, she was a
high-school girl in an upper form. I looked, not wi