The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

there were times when I used to have very restless moods. I kept thinking how I was going to spend my life; I wanted to test the future that awaited me. There were certain moments when I used to feel restless; you know how those moments come, especially when you are alone. We had a waterfall there, quite a small one, dropping high off the mountain in a delicate thread, almost vertical—white, pattering, foaming; it fell from a great height but it seemed quite low, it was a good half-mile off, but it seemed only fifty yards away. I loved to listen to it at night; it was in moments like those that I sometimes reached a peak of anxiety. Also at mid-day sometimes, on mountain walks, I’d be alone among the mountains, pine-trees all around me, ancient, tall, resinous; up there on the rock an old castle, medieval and ruinous; our village far away below, barely visible; the sun bright in the blue sky, a fearful silence. It was there that I used to sense a something that kept calling me elsewhere, and it seemed that if I walked straight ahead for a long long time, past the line, that line where sky and earth meet, the whole puzzle would be resolved and I should see a new life, a thousand times more vital and tumultuous than ours;