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July 21, 2007
for this moment one could give one’s whole life!
He fell to thinking, among other things, about his epileptic condition, that there was a stage in it just before the fit itself (if the fit occurred while he was awake), when suddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul, the pressure, his brain would momentarily catch fire, as it were, and all his life’s forces would be strained at once in an extraordinary impulse. The sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like lighting. His mind, his heart were lit up with an extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as if placated at once, resolved in a sort of sublime tranquility, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause.
Those moments were precisely only an extraordinary intensification of self-awareness-if there was a need to express this condition in a single word-self-awareness and at the same time a self-sense immediate in the highest degree. If in that second, that is, in the very last conscious moment before the fit, he had happened to succeed in saying clearly and consciously to himself: “Yes, for this moment one could give one’s whole life!”-then surely this moment in itself was worth a whole life.
He had once said, “At that moment I was somehow able to understand the extraordinary phrase that time shall be no more.”
Dostoevsky - The Idiot
Posted by amin at July 21, 2007 12:22 AM