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The decline was so gradual that he was able to delude himself by comparing one day with another and seeing little difference.
Ivan Ilyich is left there alone with the knowledge that his life has been poisoned and is poisoning other people’s lives, and the poison is not wearing off, it is working its way deeper and deeper into his very being.
And he has to live like this on the edge of destruction, alone, with nobody at all to understand and pity him.
Maybe I didn’t live as I should have done?’
what do you want now? To live? Live how? To live as you do in court when the usher yells out, “The Court is in session!”
‘What is this torture for?’ And the voice would reply, ‘It’s just there. It’s not for anything.’ Above and beyond this there was nothing.
There was one point of light back there at the beginning of life, but after that everything had been getting blacker and blacker. ‘In inverse proportion to the square of the distance from death,’ he thought. And this image of a stone accelerating as it flies down imprinted itself on his soul. Life, a series of increasing sufferings, flies ever faster towards its end, the most terrible suffering.
The doctor said that the physical pain must be dreadful, which was true. But more dreadful than the physical pain was the suffering in spirit, his greatest agony. His spiritual suffering took the form of a thought
‘What if I really have been wrong in the way I’ve lived my whole life, my conscious life?’
His career, the ordering of his life, his family, the things that preoccupied people in society and at work – all of this might have been wrong. He made an attempt at defending these things for himself. And suddenly he sensed the feebleness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.
all said the same thing to him: ‘This is wrong. Everything you have lived by, and still do, is a lie, a deception that hides life and death away from you.’
‘But what about the pain?’ he wondered. ‘Where’s it gone? Hey, pain, where are you?’
His one final decision, as an act of redemption for having lived his whole life in a lie and a self inflicted delusion, was to release his family from the heavy burden he had become. He chose to embrace the darkness, the endless pain, and the silent void that led him to the end of his hopelessness, despair, and anguish. What he found there was death, at last.
