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An Eternal Wish to Die

Captain.Heroin

Bluelight Crew
Joined
Nov 3, 2008
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‘As to life in a prison, of course there may be two
opinions,’ said the prince. ‘I once heard the story of a man
who lived twelve years in a prison—I heard it from the
man himself. He was one of the persons under treatment
with my professor; he had fits, and attacks of melancholy,
then he would weep, and once he tried to commit suicide.
HIS life in prison was sad enough; his only acquaintances
were spiders and a tree that grew outside his grating-but I
think I had better tell you of another man I met last year.
There was a very strange feature in this case, strange
because of its extremely rare occurrence. This man had
once been brought to the scaffold in company with several
others, and had had the sentence of death by shooting
passed upon him for some political crime. Twenty minutes
later he had been reprieved and some other punishment
substituted; but the interval between the two sentences,
twenty minutes, or at least a quarter of an hour, had been
passed in the certainty that within a few minutes he must
die. I was very anxious to hear him speak of his
impressions during that dreadful time, and I several times
inquired of him as to what he thought and felt. He
remembered everything with the most accurate and
extraordinary distinctness, and declared that he would
never forget a single iota of the experience.
‘About twenty paces from the scaffold, where he had
stood to hear the sentence, were three posts, fixed in the
ground, to which to fasten the criminals (of whom there
were several). The first three criminals were taken to the
posts, dressed in long white tunics, with white caps drawn
over their faces, so that they could not see the rifles
pointed at them. Then a group of soldiers took their stand
opposite to each post. My friend was the eighth on the
list, and therefore he would have been among the third lot
to go up. A priest went about among them with a cross:
and there was about five minutes of time left for him to
live.
‘He said that those five minutes seemed to him to be a
most interminable period, an enormous wealth of time; he
seemed to be living, in these minutes, so many lives that
there was no need as yet to think of that last moment, so
that he made several arrangements, dividing up the time
into portions—one for saying farewell to his companions,
two minutes for that; then a couple more for thinking
over his own life and career and all about himself; and
another minute for a last look around. He remembered
having divided his time like this quite well. While saying
good- bye to his friends he recollected asking one of them
some very usual everyday question, and being much
interested in the answer. Then having bade farewell, he
embarked upon those two minutes which he had allotted
to looking into himself; he knew beforehand what he was
going to think about. He wished to put it to himself as
quickly and clearly as possible, that here was he, a living,
thinking man, and that in three minutes he would be
nobody; or if somebody or something, then what and
where? He thought he would decide this question once
for all in these last three minutes. A little way off there
stood a church, and its gilded spire glittered in the sun. He
remembered staring stubbornly at this spire, and at the rays
of light sparkling from it. He could not tear his eyes from
these rays of light; he got the idea that these rays were his
new nature, and that in three minutes he would become
one of them, amalgamated somehow with them.
‘The repugnance to what must ensue almost
immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, he said;
but worst of all was the idea, ‘What should I do if I were
not to die now? What if I were to return to life again?
What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should
grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not
a single instant!’ He said that this thought weighed so
upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his
brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would
shoot him quickly and have done with it.’

The prince paused and all waited, expecting him to go
on again and finish the story.
‘Is that all?’ asked Aglaya.
‘All? Yes,’ said the prince, emerging from a momentary
reverie.

a passage from Dostoevsky's The Idiot
 
The story of "the other man" is from Dostoevsky's real life experience. I am not sure how many of you were aware of that.
 
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