I just read The Death of Ivan Ilyich in one shocking, depressing, scary sitting.It was simple and intense. I had read it in high school, and loved it at the time, but it's different now. Now that I have a quaking, useless, deep and utter fear of death which has haunted me since I was 25.
There's nothing to say about it really. But its inevitability thoroughly galls me.
1 comment:
It seems so inevitable, doesn't it? Just a few short years until the funeral bells ring, until that final black cloth drops down over the short bittersweet satire which is life. Kings and beggars return to the same dust, no different from each other. Sometimes there seems to be no point at all in the little trivialities of day to day life.
As the last line of Chapter IV of The Death of Ivan Ilych says, "he had to live thus all alone on the brink of an abyss, with no one who understood or pitied him."
I understand what you feel. I feel the same way after re-reading this book.
Post a Comment