he could restrain himself no longer, and cried like a child. He cried at his own helplessness, at his awful loneliness, at the cruelty of people, at the cruelty of God, at the absence of God.
“Why hast Thou done all this? What brought me to this? Why, why torture me so horribly?”
He did not expect an answer, and wept indeed that there was and could be no answer. The pain grew more acute again, but he did not stir, did not call.
He said to himself, “Come, more then; come, strike me! But what for? What have I done to Thee? what for?”
Then he was still, ceased weeping, held his breath, and was all attention; he listened, as it were, not to a voice uttering sounds, but to the voice of his soul, to the current of thoughts that rose up within him.
“What is it you want?” was the first clear idea able to be put into words that he grasped.
“What? Not to suffer, to live,” he answered.
And again he was utterly plunged into attention so intense that even the pain did not distract him.
“To live? Live how?” the voice of his soul was asking.
“Why, live as I used to live before—happily and pleasantly.”
“As you used to live before—happily and pleasantly?” queried the voice. And he began going over in his imagination the best moments of his pleasant life. But, strange to say, all these best moments of his pleasant life seemed now not at all what they had seemed then. All—except the first memories of childhood—there, in his childhood there had been