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always in a foursome (sitting out was such a bore when there were five, and you had to pretend not to mind),
This was how they lived. This was how things went, nothing changed, and everything was fine.
The fact that Ivan Ilyich sometimes complained of a strange taste in his mouth and a funny feeling in his left side didn’t count as ill health. But as it happened this funny feeling began to get worse
They were left once again with nothing more than those little islands, all too few of them, on which husband and wife could come together without an explosion.
Convinced that her husband was a horrible man who had made her life a misery, she was now sorry for herself. And the sorrier she became, the more she hated her husband. She began to wish he was dead, and then not to, because without him there would be no income. All of which made her even more exasperated with him.
The doctor was holding forth. Such-and-such demonstrates that in your insides there is such-and-such, but if this is not confirmed by our tests on this-and-that then you will need to go on to such-and-such. And if you go on to such-and-such, then … and so on.
Timeless
From the summary Ivan Ilyich drew only one conclusion: he was in a bad way and the doctor didn’t care, nobody cared probably, but he was in a bad way.
He got up, laid his money on the table and said, with a sigh, ‘I’m sure that when we’re ill we ask a lot of pointless questions. But, er, is it life-threatening or not … ?’
He reached home and started to tell his wife. His wife listened closely, but halfway through his account their daughter came in wearing a little hat – she and her mother were on their way out.
When he overheard anyone talking about people who had fallen ill, died or recovered, especially if the illness sounded like his own, he tried to hide his agitation but he listened closely, asked lots of questions and applied what he heard to his own illness.
the moment he fell out with his wife, or something went wrong at work or he got a bad hand at whist, he felt the full force of his illness.
he sensed that it was his own rage that was killing him and he couldn’t control it.
His situation was made worse by the fact that he had taken to reading medical books and consulting doctors.
A friend of a friend – a very good doctor – diagnosed something entirely different and, even though he swore he would get better, his questions and assumptions confused Ivan Ilyich even more and deepened his suspicions. A homeopath produced yet another diagnosis and gave him some medicine, which Ivan Ilyich took for a week or so without telling anyone.
One day a lady of his acquaintance talked to him about the curative powers of icons. Ivan Ilyich caught himself listening closely to what she was saying, and beginning to accept it as fact. This scared him. ‘Am I really going weak in the head?’ he wondered.
I’d rather pick one doctor and stick to what he says. That’s what I’m going to do. That’s it.
The time for fooling himself was over: something new and dreadful was going on inside Ivan Ilyich, something significant, more significant than anything in his whole life.
other times his associates would make friendly little jokes about the way he worried over his health, as if this ghastly, fearful, unheard-of thing that had got going inside him and was now incessantly gnawing at him and inexorably taking him away was a good subject and a laughing matter. The one who infuriated him most was Schwartz, with his playfulness, joie de vivre and all-round respectability which recalled the Ivan Ilyich of ten years before.
worst of all, he can see how upset Mikhail Mikhaylovich is, and he doesn’t care. And it is awful to think why he doesn’t care.
an all time line, out of context even better
They have supper and go home, and 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.
my lord
And he has to live like this on the edge of destruction, alone, with nobody at all to understand and pity him.
He looked up when he heard Ivan Ilyich approaching and stared at him in silence for a moment. That stare told Ivan Ilyich everything. His brother-in-law opened his mouth to exclaim, but managed to restrain himself. That movement confirmed everything. ‘I’ve changed, haven’t I?’ ‘Well … you have rather.’
Can’t they all see – everybody but me – that I’m dying? It’s only a matter of weeks, or days – maybe any minute now. There has been daylight; now there is darkness. I have been here; now I’m going there. Where?’
He could hear nothing but the beating of his heart.
Death is here, and I’ve been worrying about my gut. Worrying about getting my gut better, and this is death. Is it really death?’
He hated her with every fibre of his being while she was kissing him, and it took all his strength not to push her away. ‘Goodnight. God willing, you’ll soon go to sleep.’ ‘Yes.’
All his life the syllogism he had learned from Kiesewetter’s logic – Julius Caesar is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caesar is mortal – had always seemed to him to be true only when it applied to Caesar, certainly not to him.
Had Caesar been in love like him? Could Caesar chair a session like him? Yes, Caesar is mortal and it’s all right for him to die, but not me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and thoughts – it’s different for me.
It can’t be me having to die. That would be too horrible.
the worst thing was that It was distracting him not in order to make him do something but only to get him to look It straight in the eye, just look at It and do nothing but suffer beyond words.
He would go into his study, lie down and find himself alone again with It. Face to face with It. Nothing to be done about It. Only stare at It and go cold.
everybody knew that the only interesting thing about him now was whether it would take him a long time to give up his place, finally release the living from the oppression caused by his presence,
Gerasim did all of this easily, willingly and with a kindliness that Ivan Ilyich found moving. Health, strength and vitality in all other people were offensive to Ivan Ilyich; only Gerasim’s strength and vitality gave him comfort rather than distressed him.
All this lying to him, lie upon lie, on the eve of his death, lying that was inexorably reducing the solemn act of his death to the same level as their social calls, their draperies, the sturgeon for dinner
the most tormenting thing of all for Ivan Ilyich was the fact that no one showed him any pity in the way that he wanted them to.
Ivan Ilyich wanted more than anything else – however embarrassed he would have been to admit it – what he wanted was for someone to take pity on him as if he were a sick child.
the same terrible, relentless approach of hateful death,
Great poem title
anguish. It was the same thing all the time, day and night, with no end to it. Make it soon. Make what soon? Death, darkness. No, no. Anything was better than death!
One glittering drop of hope followed by a raging sea of despair, and nothing but pain, more pain, more anguish, always the same thing.
Ivan Ilyich fixes the doctor with a look that seems to ask whether anything would ever make him feel too ashamed to go on lying. The doctor does not wish to understand.
He felt that the lies that enveloped him were now so messy that he could hardly make sense of anything. Everything she did for him she was doing for herself, and she told him she was doing for herself what she was actually doing for herself, but she made it sound so implausible that he was forced to assume the opposite.
Sarah Bernhardt
Ivan Ilyich was staring straight ahead, his eyes glittering, and he was obviously furious with them. Things had to be put right, but there was absolutely no way of putting things right. Somehow the silence had to be broken. No one made a move, and everyone was becoming terrified that the living lie demanded by propriety would somehow be shattered and seen by everyone for what it was. It was Liza who made the first move. She broke the silence. She wanted to cover up what everyone was feeling, but by speaking out she revealed it. ‘Oh well, if we’re going it’s time we got started,’
He was weeping because of his own helpless state, and his loneliness, and other people’s cruelty, and God’s cruelty, and God’s non-existence.
Why hast Thou brought me to this point? Why oh why dost Thou torture me like this? …’ He was not expecting any answers; he was weeping because there were not and could not be any answers. The pain struck him again, but he didn’t move and didn’t call out. He said to himself, ‘Here it comes again. Hit me then! But what’s it for? What have I done to Thee? What is it for?’
‘What do you want?’ was the first expressible concept that came to him. ‘What do you want? What do you want?’ he repeated to himself. ‘What is it?’ ‘No more pain. Staying alive,’ came the answer. And once again his concentration became so intense that not even the pain could distract him. ‘Staying alive? How?’ asked the voice of his soul. ‘Oh, life like it used to be. Happy and good.’ ‘Life like it used to be? Happy and good?’ came the voice. And in his imagination he started to run through the best times of his happy life.
Beautiful execution
There, in his childhood, there was something truly happy that he could have lived with if it returned. But the person living out that happiness no longer existed; it was like remembering someone quite different.
Our Town
At the point where he, today’s Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.
Teared up here
the deadliness of his working life, and those money worries, going on for a year, two years, ten, twenty – always the same old story. And the longer it went on the deadlier it became.
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!
