“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 something really pleasant in which one could have lived if it had come back. But the creature who had this pleasant experience was no more; it was like a memory of someone else.