I understand
something in you, and I did not understand it till this morning."

"What's that?" laughed Ivan.

"You won't be angry?" Alyosha laughed too.

"Well?"

"That you are just as young as other young men of three and twenty, that
you are just a young and fresh and nice boy, green in fact! Now, have I
insulted you dreadfully?"

"On the contrary, I am struck by a coincidence," cried Ivan, warmly and
good-humoredly. "Would you believe it that ever since that scene with her,
I have thought of nothing else but my youthful greenness, and just as
though you guessed that, you begin about it. Do you know I've been sitting
here thinking to myself: that if I didn't believe in life, if I lost faith
in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in
fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden
chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man's disillusionment--still I
should want to live and, having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn
away from it till I had drained it! At thirty, though, I shall be sure to
leave the cup, even if I've not emptied it, and turn away--where I don't
know. But till I am thirty, I know that my youth will triumph over
everything--every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I've asked
myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that would
overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I've
come to the conclusion that there isn't, that is till I am thirty, and
then I shall lose it of myself, I fancy. Some driveling consumptive
moralists--and poets especially--often call that thirst for life base. It's
a feature of the Karamazovs, it's true, that thirst for life regardless of
everything; you have it no doubt too, but why is it base? The centripetal
force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing
for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe
in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they
open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves
you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by
men, though I've long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old
habit one's heart prizes them. Here they have brought the soup for you,
eat it, it will do you good. It's first-rate soup, they know how to make
it here. I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here.
And yet I kn