hameful, that is, disgraceful, only very shameful and...
ridiculous, such as people would remember for a thousand years and hold
in scorn for a thousand years, and suddenly the thought comes: 'one blow
in the temple and there would be nothing more.' One wouldn't care then
for men and that they would hold one in scorn for a thousand years,
would one?"

"You call that a new idea?" said Kirillov, after a moment's thought.

"I... didn't call it so, but when I thought it I felt it as a new idea."

"You 'felt the idea'?" observed Kirillov. "That's good. There are lots
of ideas that are always there and yet suddenly become new. That's true.
I see a great deal now as though it were for the first time."

"Suppose you had lived in the moon," Stavrogin interrupted, not
listening, but pursuing his own thought, "and suppose there you had done
all these nasty and ridiculous things.... You know from here for certain
that they will laugh at you and hold you in scorn for a thousand years
as long as the moon lasts. But now you are here, and looking at the moon
from here. You don't care here for anything you've done there, and that
the people there will hold you in scorn for a thousand years, do you?"

"I don't know," answered Kirillov. "I've not been in the moon," he
added, without any irony, simply to state the fact.

"Whose baby was that just now?"

"The old woman's mother-in-law was here--no, daughter-in-law, it's all
the same. Three days. She's lying ill with the baby, it cries a lot at
night, it's the stomach. The mother sleeps, but the old woman picks it
up; I play ball with it. The ball's from Hamburg. I bought it in Hamburg
to throw it and catch it, it strengthens the spine. It's a girl."

"Are you fond of children?"

"I am," answered Kirillov, though rather indifferently.

"Then you're fond of life?"

"Yes, I'm fond of life! What of it?"

"Though you've made up your mind to shoot yourself."

"What of it? Why connect it? Life's one thing and that's another. Life
exists, but death doesn't at all."

"You've begun to believe in a future eternal life?"

"No, not in a future eternal life, but in eternal life here. There are
moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stands still, and it will
become eternal."

"You hope to reach such a moment?"

"Yes."

"That'll scarcely be possible in our time," Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch
responded slowly and, as it were, dreamily; the two spoke without the
slightest irony. "In t