The Death of Ivan Ilyich

by Leo Tolstoy

‘It’s as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That’s how it was. In society’s opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me … And now it’s all over. Nothing left but to die!

Maybe I didn’t live as I should have done?’ came the sudden thought. ‘But how can that be when I did everything properly?’ he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death.