"...I'd experienced a series of bad and agonizing attacks...and...it grew worse...the fits came on several times in succession, I fell into a state of utter stupefaction, with complete loss of memory. Though my reason wasn't effected, the course of my logical thinking was interrupted, as it were, I couldn't connect more than two or three consecutive ideas. That's the impression I have retained. When the fits abated...I was in a state of unbearable melancholy, I remember; I was actually on the verge of tears all the time, in constant dismay and anxiety, and I was terribly effected by it all being so alien to me- that much I realized. The foreignness of it was crushing. [But] I emerged from my depression... I began to recover rapidly. Then each day grew more precious to me, and the passage of each new day made it all the more precious, so that I couldn't help noticing the fact. I would go to bed very pleased with the day, and awake the next morning feeling even happier. It would be very hard to say why that was so. ...At such moments I felt something calling me into the distance, and it would seem that if I were to walk straight ahead for a long, long time, and cross that distant line where the earth and sky met, I would find the key to everything and at once behold a new life a thousand times more thrilling and vibrant than ours."
     Prince Myshkin (From Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky quotes from THE WAY OF WONDER, by Jack Haas