course, intellect, too, is transient and not
eternal, but you know why I cherish a partiality for it. Life is a
vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains
to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap
from which there is no escape. Indeed, he is summoned without his
choice by fortuitous circumstances from non-existence into life
. . . what for? He tries to find out the meaning and object of his
existence; he is told nothing, or he is told absurdities; he knocks
and it is not opened to him; death comes to him--also without his
choice. And so, just as in prison men held together by common
misfortune feel more at ease when they are together, so one does
not notice the trap in life when people with a bent for analysis
and generalization meet together and pass their time in the interchange
of proud and free ideas. In that sense the intellect is the source
of an enjoyment nothing can replace."

"Perfectly true."

Not looking his friend in the face, Andrey Yefimitch would go on,
quietly and with pauses, talking about intellectual people and
conversation with them, and Mihail Averyanitch would listen attentively
and agree: "Perfectly true."

"And you do not believe in the immortality of the soul?" he would
ask suddenly.

"No, honoured Mihail Averyanitch; I do not believe it, and have no
grounds for believing it."

"I must own I doubt it too. And yet I have a feeling as though I
should never die. Oh, I think to myself: 'Old fogey, it is time you
were dead!' But there is a little voice in my soul says: 'Don't
believe it; you won't die.'"

Soon after nine o'clock Mihail Averyanitch would go away. As he put
on his fur coat in the entry he would say with a sigh:

"What a wilderness fate has carried us to, though, really! What's
most vexatious of all is to have to die here. Ech! . ."

VII

After seeing his friend out Andrey Yefimitch would sit down at the
table and begin reading again. The stillness of the evening, and
afterwards of the night, was not broken by a single sound, and it
seemed as though time were standing still and brooding with the
doctor over the book, and as though there were nothing in existence
but the books and the lamp with the green shade. The doctor's coarse
peasant-like face was gradually lighted up by a smile of delight
and enthusiasm over the progress of the human intellect. Oh, why
is not man immortal? he thought. What is the good of the brain
centres