“Why I am prematurely weak and fallen is not hard to explain.  Like Samson of old, I have taken the gates of Gaza on my shoulders to carry them to the top of the mountain, and only when I was exhausted, when youth and health were quenched in me forever, I noticed that that burden was not for my shoulders, and that I had deceived myself.  I have been, moreover, in cruel and continual pain.  I have endured cold, hunger, illness, and loss of liberty.  Of personal happiness I know and have known nothing.  I have no home; my memories are bitter, and my conscience is often in dread of them.  But why have you fallen—­you?  What fatal, diabolical causes hindered your life from blossoming into full flower?  Why, almost before beginning life, were you in such haste to cast off the image and likeness of God, and to become a cowardly beast who backs and scares others because he is afraid himself?  You are afraid of life—­as afraid of it as an Oriental who sits all day on a cushion smoking his hookah.  Yes, you read a great deal, and a European coat fits you well, but yet with what tender, purely Oriental, pasha-like care you protect yourself from hunger, cold, physical effort, from pain and uneasiness!  How early your soul has taken to its dressing-gown!  What a cowardly part you have played towards real life and nature, with which every healthy and normal man struggles!  How soft, how snug, how warm, how comfortable—­and how bored you are!  Yes, it is deathly boredom, unrelieved by one ray of light, as in solitary confinement; but you try to hide from that enemy, too, you play cards eight hours out of twenty-four.

“And your irony?  Oh, but how well I understand it!  Free, bold, living thought is searching and dominating; for an indolent, sluggish mind it is intolerable.  That it may not disturb your peace, like thousands of your contemporaries, you made haste in youth to put it under bar and bolt.  Your ironical attitude to life, or whatever you like to call it, is your armour; and your thought, fettered and frightened, dare not leap over the fence you have put round it; and when you jeer at ideas which you pretend to know all about, you are like the deserter fleeing from the field of battle, and, to stifle his shame, sneering at war and at valour.  Cynicism stifles pain.  In some novel of Dostoevsky’s an old man tramples underfoot the portrait of his dearly loved daughter because he had been unjust to her, and you vent your foul and vulgar jeers upon the ideas of goodness and truth because you have not the strength to follow them.  You are frightened of every honest and truthful hint at your degradation, and you purposely surround yourself with people who do nothing but flatter your weaknesses.  And you may well, you may well dread the sight of tears!