“I was thinking that even if I believed that life was pointless, lost faith in the woman I loved, lost faith in the order of things, or even became convinced that I was surrounded by a disorderly, evil, perhaps devil-made chaos, even if I were completely overcome by the horrors of human despair—I would still want to live on; once I have started drinking from this cup, I won’t put it down until I have emptied it to the last drop. It’s quite possible, though, that by the time I’m thirty I will have tossed away the cup without really having finished it, and I will go off in who knows what direction. I know for sure that until then my youth will have overcome everything—every disappointment, every disgust caused by life. Many times I’ve asked myself whether there is anything in the world that could crush my frantic, indecent appetite for life, and have decided that it looks as though nothing of the sort exists. But, of course, that may be true only until I reach the age of thirty, for then I may lose interest in life altogether, at least so it seems to me. This appetite for life is often
branded as despicable by various spluttering moralists and even more so by poets. It, of course, is the outstanding feature in us Karamazovs—and you, too, you have this inordinate appetite for life, I’m certain of it—but what is there so despicable about it? There’s still an enormous amount of centripetal force left in our planet, Alyosha, my boy, so I want to live and go on living, even if it’s contrary to the rules of logic. Even if I do not believe in the divine order of things, the sticky young leaves emerging from their buds in the spring are dear to my heart; so is the blue sky and so are some human beings, even though I often don’t know why I like them; I may still even admire an act of heroism with my whole heart, perhaps out of habit, although I may have long since stopped believing in heroism.”