Now I know and feel it, and always when I recall our differences, and the unkind words I have said to you, I am pained and ashamed, and can hardly understand it. Forgive me, and remember only the good, if there was any in me! I am not afraid of death. To speak frankly, I do not understand it or believe in it. After all, if death—annihilation—exists, is it not all the same whether we die thirty years or thirty minutes sooner or later? And if there is no death, then it is quite indifferent whether it happens sooner or later.”
“But why am I philosophizing?” he thought. “I must say what I said in the other letter—something good at the end. Yes. … ‘Do not reproach my friends, but love them—especially the one who was the involuntary cause of my death. Kiss Natásha for me, and tell her that I have always loved her.’ ”
“What is it? What is going to happen?” he thought again, remembering. “Nothing? No, not nothing. … What, then?”
And suddenly it grew quite clear to him that for a living man there were, and could be, no answers to these questions.
“Then why am I putting these questions to myself? Why? Yes, why? I must not question, but live—live, as I was living just now while writing this letter. Have we not all been sentenced to death long ago, and yet we go on living? We live happily … joyfully … when we love. Yes, when we love. … While I was writing, I loved and felt happy, and I must go on living so. That is possible everywhere and always—when free and when in prison, today and tomorrow, till the end.”
He longed to speak to someone gently and lovingly at once, and knocked at the door. When the sentinel looked in at his window, he asked him what the time was, and if he would soon be relieved; but the sentinel did not answer. Then he asked for the inspector.