"'Surely I am not in love?' I asked myself, scratching my hand.

"Only as night came on when the passengers were asleep and I was
left _tête-à-tête_ with my conscience, I began to understand what
I had not been able to grasp before. In the twilight of the railway
carriage the image of Kisotchka rose before me, haunted me and I
recognised clearly that I had committed a crime as bad as murder.
My conscience tormented me. To stifle this unbearable feeling, I
assured myself that everything was nonsense and vanity, that Kisotchka
and I would die and decay, that her grief was nothing in comparison
with death, and so on and so on . . . and that if you come to that,
there is no such thing as freewill, and that therefore I was not
to blame. But all these arguments only irritated me and were
extraordinarily quickly crowded out by other thoughts. There was a
miserable feeling in the hand that Kisotchka had kissed. . . . I
kept lying down and getting up again, drank vodka at the stations,
forced myself to eat bread and butter, fell to assuring myself again
that life had no meaning, but nothing was of any use. A strange and
if you like absurd ferment was going on in my brain. The most
incongruous ideas crowded one after another in disorder, getting
more and more tangled, thwarting each other, and I, the thinker,
'with my brow bent on the earth,' could make out nothing and could
not find my bearings in this mass of essential and non-essential
ideas. It appeared that I, the thinker, had not mastered the technique
of thinking, and that I was no more capable of managing my own brain
than mending a watch. For the first time in my life I was really
thinking eagerly and intensely, and that seemed to me so monstrous
that I said to myself: 'I am going off my head.' A man whose brain
does not work at all times, but only at painful moments, is often
haunted by the thought of madness.