he was, lying with his face turned to the back of the divan, that loneliness in the midst of the populous city, and his numerous acquaintances and their families, a loneliness more complete than any loneliness to be found elsewhere, whether it were to be sought in the bottom of the sea or in the earth—in the latter period of this frightful loneliness Ivan Il'ich lived in imagination entirely in the past. One after another the pictures of his past life presented themselves before him. It always began with what was nearest in time and went on to what was most distant—to his childhood, and there stopped. When Ivan Il'ich thought of the preserved plums which they were giving him to eat now, he called to mind a moist, wrinkled plum in his childhood, of its peculiar taste, and of how his mouth watered when he got down to the kernel, and along with this recollection of the taste of the plum there arose a whole series of other recollections of the same period—his nurse, his brother, his playthings. "But I mustn't think of that, it is too painful," said Ivan Il'ich to himself, and again he transferred his thoughts to the present time. The buttons on the back of the divan, and the wrinkles of the morocco reminded him of something else. "Morocco is dear, it wont last," his wife had said, "and there had been a quarrel about that. But the morocco was another morocco, and there was another quarrel "when we tore papa's portfolio, and they punished us, and mamma brought us cakes." And again he lingered over his childhood, and again it was painful to Ivan Il'ich, and he tried to drive it away and to think of something else.
