White nights

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.

I cannot help recalling my moral condition all that day. From early morning I had been oppressed by a strange despondency.

They, of course, do not know me, but I know them.

(for if one chair is not standing in the same position as it stood the day before, I am not myself).

I took long walks, succeeding, as I usually did, in quite forgetting where I was,

unconscious of fatigue, and feeling only all over as though a burden were falling off my soul.

And you grieve that the momentary beauty has faded so soon never to return, that it flashed upon you so treacherously, so vainly, grieve because you had not even time to love her....