My favorite passage...

The beauty and ingenuity of this passage, which comes in the middle of Chapter X of Ivan, surpasses, I think, anything else that Tolstoy ever wrote.

In this recent days of loneliness in which he found himself lying with his face towards the back of the couch, of a loneliness in the midst of a populous city among his numerous acquaintances and family, of a loneliness more complete than there could be anywhere else—not at the bottom of the ocean nor on the earth—in the recent days of that awful loneliness Ivan Ilich lived only in his imagining of the past. One after another, scenes of his past appeared to him. It always started with the most recent and then went to the most distant, to childhood, and with that they stopped. When he thought of the stewed prunes that had been offered to him today, he thought of the dry, wrinkled French prune of childhood, its special flavor and the saliva that would flow when it got down to the pit, and along with this reminiscence of the taste arose a whole series of reminiscences of that time: Nanny, brother, toys. “Don’t bother about that… it’s too painful,” he’d say to himself and again he’d be transported into the present. The buttons on the back of the sofa and the wrinkles of the Morocco leather. “The leather was expensive and doesn’t wear well; we had an argument because of it. But it was a different leather, and a different argument, when we ripped Father’s briefcase, and they punished us, but Mother brought us pastries.” And again it ended in childhood, and again Ivan Ilich felt pain, and he tried to banish the thought and thing of something different. And at the very same time, along with the series of memories, in his soul another series of memories passed—how his illness had grown and gotten stronger. Again, the further back the more life there was. And there was more good in life, and more of life itself. And the one and the other merged together. Just as the torment got worse and worse, so did life get worse and worse, he thought. There was one bright point there, in the back, at the beginning of life, and then everything got blacker and blacker and everything got faster and faster. “Inversely proportional to the square of the distance from death,” thought Ivan Ilich. And that image of a rock, flying downwards with increasing velocity, sank deep into his soul. Life, a series of increasing suffering, flies faster and faster towards its end, towards worse suffering. “I’m flying…”He shuddered, stirred, and wanted to resist, but he knew already that resistance was impossible, and again, tired of looking, but unable not to look what was before him, with his eyes he stared at the back of the couch and waited, waited for that awful fall, the shock, and the destruction. (My translation)