For a year I busied myself with arbitration work, the schools, and the magazine; and I became so worn out⁠—as a result especially of my mental confusion⁠—and so hard was my struggle as Arbiter, so obscure the results of my activity in the schools, so repulsive my shuffling in the magazine (which always amounted to one and the same thing: a desire to teach everybody and to hide the fact that I did not know what to teach), that I fell ill, mentally rather than physically, threw up everything, and went away to the Bashkirs in the steppes, to breathe fresh air, drink kumys, 5 and live a merely animal life.