The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

He pondered, among other things, the fact that there was a stage in his epileptic condition just before the fit itself (if it occurred during waking hours) when all of a sudden, amid the sadness, spiritual darkness, and oppression, there were moments when his brain seemed to flare up momentarily and all his vital forces tense themselves at once in an extraordinary surge. The sensation of being alive and self-aware increased almost tenfold in those lightning-quick moments. His mind and heart were bathed in an extraordinary illumination. All his agitation, all his doubts and anxieties, seemed to be instantly reconciled and resolved into a lofty serenity, filled with pure, harmonious gladness and hope, filled too with the consciousness of the ultimate cause of all things. But these moments, these flashes, were merely the prelude to that final second (never more than a second) which marked the onset of the actual fit. That second was, of course, unendurable. Reflecting on that moment afterwards when he had recovered, he often used to tell himself that all these gleams and lightning-flashes of heightened self-awareness, and hence also of ‘higher existence’, were nothing more than the illness itself, violating the normal state of things as it did, and thus it was not a higher mode of existence at all—on the contrary, it should be regarded as the lowest. And yet he arrived at length at a paradoxical conclusion: ‘What if it is the illness then?’ he decided finally. ‘What does it m...