The Brothers Karamazov

“You keep thinking about our present earth! But our present earth may have repeated itself a billion times; it died out, let’s say, got covered with ice, cracked, fell to pieces, broke down into its original components, again there were the waters above the firmament, then again a comet, again the sun, again the earth from the sun—all this development may already have been repeated an infinite number of times, and always in the same way, to the last detail. A most unspeakable bore...”

“Go on, what happened when he arrived?”

“The moment the doors of paradise were opened and he went in, before he had even been there two seconds—and that by the watch, the watch (though I should think that on the way his watch would long ago have broken down into its component elements in his pocket)—before he had been there two seconds, he exclaimed that for those two seconds it would be worth walking not just a quadrillion kilometers, but a quadrillion quadrillion, even raised to the quadrillionth power! In short, he sang ‘Hosannah’ and oversweetened it so much that some persons there, of a nobler cast of mind, did not even want to shake hands with him at first: he jumped over to the conservatives a bit too precipitously. The Russian character. I repeat: it’s a legend. Take it for what it’s worth. That’s the sort of ideas current among us on all these subjects.”

“Caught you!” Ivan cried out with almost childish glee, as if he had now finally remembered something. “That anecdote about the quadrillion years— I made it up myself! I was seventeen years old then, I was in high school ... I made up that anecdote then and told it to a friend of mine, his last name was Korovkin, it was in Moscow ... It’s such a typical anecdote that I couldn’t have gotten it from anywhere. I almost forgot it ... but now I’ve unconsciously recalled it—recalled it myself, not because you told it to me! Just as one sometimes recalls a thousand things unconsciously, even when one is being taken out to be executed ... I’ve remembered it in a dream. You are my dream! You’re a dream, you don’t exist!” “Judging by the enthusiasm with which you deny me,” the gentleman laughed, “I’m convinced that you do believe in me all the same.”

“Not in the least! Not for a hundredth part do I believe in you!”

“But for a thousandth part you do believe. Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest. Admit that you do believe, let’s say for a ten-thousandth part ...”

“Not for one moment!” Ivan cried in a rage. “And, by the way, I should like to believe in you!” he suddenly added strangely.

“Aha! Quite a confession, really! But I am kind, I will help you here, too. Listen, it is I who have caught you, not you me! I deliberately told you your own anecdote, which you had forgotten, so that you would finally lose faith in me.”

“Lies! The purpose of your appearance is to convince me that you are.”

“Precisely. But hesitation, anxiety, the struggle between belief and disbelief—all that is sometimes such a torment for a conscientious man like yourself, that it’s better to hang oneself. Precisely because I knew you had a tiny bit of belief in me, I let in some final disbelief, by telling you that anecdote. I’m leading you alternately between belief and disbelief, and I have my own purpose in doing so. A new method, sir: when you’ve completely lost faith in me, then you’ll immediately start convincing me to my face that I am not a dream but a reality—I know you now; and then my goal will be achieved. And it is a noble goal. I will sow just a tiny seed of faith in you, and from it an oak will grow—and such an oak that you, sitting in that oak, will want to join ‘the desert fathers and the blameless women’;^[318] because secretly you want that verry, ver-ry much, you will dine on locusts, you will drag yourself to the desert to seek salvation!”

“So, you scoundrel, you’re troubling yourself over the salvation of my soul?”

“One needs to do a good deed sometimes, at least. But I see you’re angry with me, really angry!”

“Buffoon! And have you ever tempted them, the ones who eat locusts and pray for seventeen years in the barren desert, and get overgrown with moss?”

“My dear, I’ve done nothing else. One forgets the whole world and all worlds, and clings to such a one, because a diamond like that is just too precious; one such soul is sometimes worth a whole constellation—we have our own arithmetic. It’s a precious victory! And some of them, by God, are not inferior to you in development, though you won’t believe it: they can contemplate such abysses of belief and disbelief at one and the same moment that, really, it sometimes seems that another hair’s breadth and a man would fall in ‘heel-over-headed,’ as the actor Gorbunov says.”^[319]