Demons

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Yes… Wait, do you ever have moments of eternal harmony, Shatov?’ ‘You know, Kirillov, you must put a stop to not sleeping at night.’ Kirillov snapped out of it and, strangely enough, began to speak much more coherently than he usually did; it was evident that he had already formulated all of this long before, and had perhaps written it down. ‘There are seconds — they come only five or six at a time — when you suddenly feel the presence of an eternal harmony that has been fully attained. This is not something earthly. I’m not saying that it’s heavenly, but that man in his earthly form cannot endure it. He must change physically or else die. It is a clear and unambiguous feeling. It’s as if you suddenly have a sense of nature as a whole, and you suddenly say: yes, this is true. God, when he was creating the world, said at the end of each day of creation: “Yes, this is true, this is good.” 4 This… this is not deep emotion, but is simply joy. You don’t forgive anything, because there’s no longer anything to forgive. You don’t really love — oh, this is higher than love! If it lasts longer than five seconds, your soul can’t endure it and must disappear. In these five seconds I live an entire lifetime, and for them I will give my entire life, because it’s worth it. In order to endure ten seconds, one must change physically. I think that man should stop giving birth. Why have children, why have evolution if the goal has been attained? In the Gospels it is said that in the resurrec...