The ridiculous dream

You see, I don't care about it at all, but I can feel pain, for example. If someone had hit me, I would have felt the pain. The same is true in spirit: if something pitiful happens, I feel pitiful, just as I did in the past when I was not indifferent to anything in life. I had pity on the little girl: I had to help her. But why didn't I help? It was the thought that, as she held me back and called me, a question suddenly appeared before me and I could not resolve it. The question was boring, but I was angry. I was angry because I had come to the conclusion that, having resolved to kill myself tonight, I was more indifferent to the world now than I had ever been before. Why do I suddenly feel that I am not all indifferent, and pity a little girl? I remember feeling so much pity for her that I even felt a strange feeling of pain, which, in my circumstances, was hard to believe. It is true that I cannot better convey the fleeting feeling I had at that moment, but it did not go away until I went home and sat down at the table, and I was more angry than I have been for a long time. The inferences began to pour in. It was evident that since I was a man, and not a mere thing, and had not for the time been reduced to nothing, I was still alive, and therefore afflicted, and angry, and ashamed of my conduct. Let's just say that. But since I was going to kill myself, say, in two hours I was going to be dead, what was the little girl to me? What do I have to do with shame and everything in the world? I'm going up in smoke, dead and gone. The knowledge that I was about to disappear, and therefore to cease to exist, had not, then, the slightest effect on my affection for the little girl, and on my shame at having done the mean thing? It is for this reason, you see, that I stamped my foot at the unfortunate little girl, and growled at her savagely, as if to say, "Not only have I no sympathy, but if I had to do any inhuman evil, I could do it now, for in two hours it will all be gone." Can you believe it? That's why I yelled at her. I'm almost convinced of that now. It was quite obvious that life and the world now depended on me; it was even as if the world had been created for me alone: if I had killed myself, there would be no more of it, at least for me. As soon as my senses disappear, the whole world dies, like a ghost, as if it were attached to my senses, for this whole world and all mankind may be myself. It is needless to say that after my death there may really be nothing for anyone. I remember sitting there thinking over and over all these new questions which came up one after another, and even getting whimsical. It suddenly occurred to me, for instance, that if I had lived on the Moon or on Mars, and had done the most shameful things there, and had been denounced and humiliated, this would have been felt and imagined only sometimes in dreams or nightmares; And if, when I came to the Earth, I remembered what I had done on other planets, and knew, moreover, that I would never return to the Moon, would I look up at it from the Earth - - and feel nothing? Do you feel ashamed of yourself? It was useless and superfluous to contemplate these questions, for the pistol was before me, and I felt in my whole body that it would happen. But these questions irritate me and make me angry. I can't seem to die for a while without figuring it out. In short, the little girl saved me, and because of these problems I delayed my suicide. By this time the noise in the captain's room had begun to die down: they were getting ready for bed after a game of cards, but for the moment there was still grumbling and lazy little cursing. At that moment I fell asleep in my easy chair beside the table, as I had never done before. I fell asleep completely without knowing it. Dreams, as you know, are curious things: some are so clear, and detailed as jewels; Some of them you'll feel like they've passed you by, like they've gone beyond time and space. Dreams seem to be caused not by reason but by desire, not by the brain but by the heart; And yet, how clever my reason can be in dreams, and it can produce things that are utterly inconceivable. For example, it has been five years since my brother died, and I still dream about him sometimes: he helps me with things, and we care about each other, and I always remember very clearly in my dream that my brother is dead and buried. Why should my reason be so tolerant of the fact that he is still busy with me, though he is dead? Okay, let's not talk about that. Let's talk about my dream. Yes, I had a dream, the dream of the third of November! They still laugh at me and say it was only a dream. But if that dream can tell me the truth, doesn't it matter if it's a dream or not? If you discover and recognize the truth, then you know, whether you are asleep or awake, that this is the truth, and that there is no other truth and can be no other. Well, let it be a dream, let it be that, but I'm going to kill myself with this life you're talking so much about, and my dreams, my dreams -- oh, show me a new life, bright and fresh and alive!

Please hear me go on.