rs. I've tried to hold my end up properly and do my work. After
Fowler has done with me I am certain I shall be unfit for work--and what
else is there for me? . . . I know I shall not be fit for work....

'I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing thread of
vitality.... I know it for the splendid thing it is--I who have been
a diseased creature from the beginning. I know it well enough not to
confuse it with its husks. Remember that, Gardener, if presently my
heart fails me and I despair, and if I go through a little phase of pain
and ingratitude and dark forgetfulness before the end.... Don't believe
what I may say at the last.... If the fabric is good enough the selvage
doesn't matter. It can't matter. So long as you are alive you are just
the moment, perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all your life
from the first moment to the last....'

Section 4

Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to him, and
he could forget himself again. Rachel Borken sat for a long time with
him and talked chiefly of women in the world, and with her was a girl
named Edith Haydon who was already very well known as a cytologist. And
several of the younger men who were working in the place and a patient
named Kahn, a poet, and Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spent
some time with him. The talk wandered from point to point and came
back upon itself, and became now earnest and now trivial as the chance
suggestions determined. But soon afterwards Gardener wrote down notes
of things he remembered, and it is possible to put together again the
outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and felt about many
of the principal things in life.

'Our age,' he said, 'has been so far an age of scene-shifting. We have
been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama that was
played out and growing tiresome.... If I could but sit out the first few
scenes of the new spectacle....

'How encumbered the world had become! It was ailing as I am ailing with
a growth of unmeaning things. It was entangled, feverish, confused. It
was in sore need of release, and I suppose that nothing less than the
violence of those bombs could have released it and made it a healthy
world again. I suppose they were necessary. Just as everything turns
to evil in a fevered body so everything seemed turning to evil in those
last years of the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete organisations
seizing upon a