The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1877)

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

[...] if something very pitiful were to take place, I would feel pity just as I would have done when things in my life did make a difference to me.

But does it really make any difference whether it was a dream or not, if this dream proclaimed to me the Truth? You see, once you've learned the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and there is no other, nor can there be, whether you are asleep or awake.

I lay there and strangely enough - I didn't expect anything, having accepted without argument that a dead man has nothing to expect.

I kept assuring myself that I wasn't afraid, and I was beside myself with delight at the thought that I wasn't afraid.

I love, I can only love that earth which I left behind, which I left spattered with my blood, when I, ingrate that I am, extinguished my life with a bullet to the heart. But never, never have I stopped loving that earth, and even on that night, as I was leaving it, I perhaps loved it even more agonizingly than I had ever done before. Is there suffering on this new earth? On our earth we can truly love only with suffering and only through suffering! Otherwise, we don't know how to love and we know no other kind of love. I want suffering in order to love. I want, I thirst this very minute to kiss, with tears pouring down my face, only that one and the same earth that I left behind, and I don't want, I won't accept life on any other!

Children of the sun, children of their own sun - oh, how beautiful they were! Never had I seen on our earth such beauty in a human being. Perhaps only in our children, in the very first years of their life, could one have seen a distant though faint reflection of this beauty.

[...] it seemed inexplicable that, for example, they who know so much, don't possess our science. But I soon understood that their knowledge was imbued with and nurtured by other convictions than is the case with us on earth, and that their aspirations were quite different as well. They desired nothing and were at peace; they did not aspire to an understanding of life like we do, because their lives were full. But their knowledge was deeper and loftier than our science; for our science seeks to explain what life is, it aspires to understand it in order to teach others how to life; while they, even without science knew how they should live, and I understood that, but I could not understand their knowledge. They pointed out their trees for me and I couldn't understand the degree of love with which they looked at them: it was as if they were talking with beings like themselves. And do you know, maybe I wouldn't be mistaken if I were to say that they were talking with them! Yes, they had found their language, and I'm convinced that the trees understood them. That was how they regarded all of nature - the animals who lived peaceably with them, who didn't attack them and loved them, mastered by their love. They pointed out the stars to me and talked to me about them, and though I could not understand I am convinced that they were somehow in contact with the heavenly stars, not only by means of their thoughts but also in some vital way.

They were almost without illness, though there was death; but the old people died quietly, as if falling asleep, surrounded by people who had come to bid them farewell, bless them, smile at them and receive in return radiant smiles of farewell. Moreover, I saw neither sorrow nor tears, but only love that was multiplied, as it were, to the point of rapture, but a rapture that calm, contented, contemplative. One might think that they were in contact with their dead even after death and that this earthly union was not dissolved by death.

They remembered only a tiny bit of what they had lost; they didn't even want to believe that they had once been innocent and happy. They even laughed at the possibility of this former happiness of theirs and called it a dream. They couldn't even imagine its forms and images, but the strange and wonderful thing of it was that though they had lost all faith in their former happiness, and called it a fairy tale, they so wanted to be innocent and happy anew, once again, that they fell down before their heart's desire, like children; they idolized this desire, they built temples and began to pray to this idea of theirs, to this 'desire', while at the same time recognizing full well its unrealizability and impracticability, even as they tearfully worshipped it and bowed down before it.