bed, but he lay on the divan. And lying almost the whole time with his face to the wall, he suffered continually in his solitude the same inexplicable sufferings, and kept on thinking the same inexplicable thought: "What is this? Can it be true that this is death?" And the inner voice answered: "Yes, it is true."—"Wherefore these torments?"—It is because, not wherefore. Besides and beyond this there was nothing at all.
From the very beginning of his illness, from the time that Ivan Il'ich first went to the doctor, his life had been divided between two opposite interchanging tendencies—on the one hand despair and the expectation of an unintelligible and terrible death; on the other hand hope and the absorbingly interesting observation of the natural processes of his body; on the one hand was an unintelligible, terrible death, from which there was absolutely no escape; and, on the other hand, there was constantly before his eyes his bowels or his kidneys, which temporarily refused to perform their proper functions.
From the very beginning of his illness these two tendencies were continually superseding each other; but the further the disease advanced the more dubious and fantastic became the physiological ideas, and the more real the consciousness of approaching death.
He had only to remember what he had been three months before and what he was now—he had only to remember how steadily he had been going downhill, in order to destroy every possibility of hope.
During the latter period of the loneliness in which
