For some time the prince strolled about aimlessly.
He was little acquainted with the city.
He stopped occasionally at street corners in front of some houses, on the squares, on the bridges; once he stopped at a pastry shop to rest.
Occasionally he would start peering at passersby with great curiosity; but most often he did not notice either the passersby or precisely where he was going.
He was tormentingly tense and uneasy, and at the same time felt an extraordinary need for solitude.
He wanted to be alone and to give himself over to all this suffering tension completely passively, without looking for the least way out.
He was loath to resolve the questions that overflowed his soul and heart.
"What, then, am I to blame for it all?" he murmured to himself, almost unaware of his words.
By six o'clock he found himself on the platform of the Tsarskoe Selo railway.
Solitude quickly became unbearable to him; a new impulse ardently seized his heart, and for a moment a bright light lit up the darkness in which his soul anguished.
He took a ticket for Pavlovsk and was in an impatient hurry to leave; but something was certainly pursuing him, and this was a reality and not a fantasy, as he had perhaps been inclined to think.
He was about to get on the train when he suddenly flung the just-purchased ticket to the floor and left the station again, confused and pensive.
A short time later, in the street, it was as if he suddenly remembered, suddenly realized, something very strange, something that had long been bothering him.
He was suddenly forced to catch himself consciously doing something that had been going on for a long time, but which he had not noticed till that minute: several hours ago, even in the Scales, and perhaps even before the Scales, he had begun now and then suddenly searching for something around him.
And he would forget it, even for a long time, half an hour, and then suddenly turn again uneasily and search for something.
But he had only just noted to himself this morbid and till then quite unconscious movement, which had come over him so long ago, when there suddenly flashed before him another recollection that interested him extremely: he recalled that at the moment when he noticed that he kept searching around for something, he was standing on the sidewalk outside a shopwindow and looking with great curiosity at the goods displayed in the window.
He now wanted to make absolutely sure: had he really been standing in front of that shopwindow just now, perhaps only five minutes ago, had he not imagined it or confused something?
Did that shop and those goods really exist?
For indeed he felt himself in an especially morbid mood that day, almost as he had felt formerly at the onset of the fits of his former illness.
He knew that during this time before a fit he used to be extraordinarily absentminded and often even confused objects and persons, unless he looked at them with especially strained attention.
But there was also a special reason why he wanted very much to make sure that he had been standing in front of the shop: among the things displayed in the shopwindow there had been one that he had looked at and that he had even evaluated at sixty kopecks, he remembered that despite all his absentmindedness and anxiety.
Consequently, if that shop existed and that thing was actually displayed among the goods for sale, it meant he had in fact stopped for that thing.
Which meant that the thing had held such strong interest for him that it had attracted his attention even at the very time when he had left the railway station and had been so painfully confused.
He walked along, looking to the right almost in anguish, his heart pounding with uneasy impatience.
But here was the shop, he had found it at last!
He had been five hundred paces away from it when he decided to go back.
And here was that object worth sixty kopecks. "Of course, sixty kopecks, it's not worth more!" he repeated now and laughed.
But he laughed hysterically; he felt very oppressed.
He clearly recalled now that precisely here, standing in front of this window, he had suddenly turned, as he had earlier, when he had caught Rogozhin's eyes fixed on him.
Having made sure that he was not mistaken (which, incidentally, he had been quite sure of even before checking), he abandoned the shop and quickly walked away from it. All this he absolutely had to think over quickly; it was now clear that he had not imagined anything at the station either, and that something absolutely real had happened to him, which was absolutely connected with all his earlier uneasiness.
But some invincible inner loathing again got the upper hand: he did not want to think anything over, he did not think anything over; he fell to thinking about something quite different.
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 lightning.
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 tranquillity, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause.
But these moments, these glimpses were still only a presentiment of that ultimate second (never more than a second) from which the fit itself began.
That second was, of course, unbearable.
Reflecting on that moment afterwards, in a healthy state, he had often said to himself that all those flashes and glimpses of a higher self-sense and self-awareness, and therefore of the "highest being," were nothing but an illness, a violation of the normal state, and if so, then this was not the highest being at all but, on the contrary, should be counted as the very lowest.
And yet he finally arrived at an extremely paradoxical conclusion: "So what if it is an illness?" he finally decided. "Who cares that it's an abnormal strain, if the result itself, if the moment of the sensation, remembered and examined in a healthy state, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony, beauty, gives a hitherto unheard-of and unknown feeling of fullness, measure, reconciliation, and an ecstatic, prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?"
These vague expressions seemed quite comprehensible to him, though still too weak.
That it was indeed "beauty and prayer," that it was indeed "the highest synthesis of life," he could not doubt, nor could he admit of any doubts.
Was he dreaming some sort of abnormal and nonexistent visions at that moment, as from hashish, opium, or wine, which humiliate the reason and distort the soul?
He could reason about it sensibly once his morbid state was over.
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.22 However, he did not insist on the dialectical part of his reasoning: dullness, darkness of soul, idiocy stood before him as the clear consequence of these "highest moments."
Naturally, he was not about to argue in earnest.
His reasoning, that is, his evaluation of this moment, undoubtedly contained an error, but all the same he was somewhat perplexed by the actuality of the sensation.
What, in fact, was he to do with this actuality?
Because it had happened, he had succeeded in saying to himself in that very second, that this second, in its boundless happiness, which he fully experienced, might perhaps be worth his whole life.
"At that moment," as he had once said to Rogozhin in Moscow, when they got together there, "at that moment I was somehow able to understand the extraordinary phrase that time shall be no more.23 Probably," he had added, smiling, "it's the same second in which the jug of water overturned by the epileptic Muhammad did not have time to spill, while he had time during the same second to survey all the dwellings of Allah."24 Yes, in Moscow he and Rogozhin had often gotten together and talked not only about that.