Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [141]
‘I am speaking only of myself – not out of egoism, but because when I am lying at the bottom of this abyss you will still be soaring high above it like a pure angel, and I doubt whether you will want to cast a glance into it. Listen, let me put it plainly and frankly and without circumlocution: you do not love me and you cannot love me. Trust my experience and believe me absolutely. For my heart began beating long ago; it may have been beating wrongly and out of tune, but that is what taught me to distinguish its regular from its irregular beat. You cannot but I can and should know how to recognize truth from error, and I am in duty bound to warn one who has not had time to recognize it. And so I am warning you: you are in error, turn back!
‘So long as our love took the form of a light, smiling vision, so long as it sounded in the Casta diva, came to us in the scent of a sprig of lilac, in unexpressed sympathy, in a shy glance, I did not trust it, taking it for a mere play of the imagination and the whisper of vanity. But the time for innocent play has passed; I have fallen ill with love, I have felt the symptoms of passion; you have grown thoughtful and serious; you have devoted your leisure to me, you are in a state of nerves, you have grown restless, and it was then – I mean, it is now, that I am frightened and feel that it is my duty to stop and tell you what it is.
‘I have told you that I love you, and you said the same to me – don’t you hear how discordant this sounds? You don’t? Well, you will hear it later when I am already in the abyss. Look at me, think carefully of what my life is like: is it possible for you to love me? Do you love me? “I love you, I love you, I love you” – you said yesterday. “No, no, no!” I answer firmly.
‘You do not love me, but – I hasten to add – you are not lying, nor are you deceiving me; you cannot say yes, when everything in you is saying no. I only want to prove to you that your present “I love you” is not real love, but only the expectation of love in the future; it is merely an unconscious need of love which, for lack of proper food, for lack of fire, burns with a false flame, without warmth, which with some women finds expression in fondling a child and with others simply in fits of crying or hysterics. From the very beginning I ought to have said to you sternly: “You have made a mistake. The man you have longed for and dreamed of is not before you. Wait, he will come, and then you will come to yourself and you will be vexed and ashamed of your mistake, and your shame and vexation will hurt me.” That’s what I should have said to you, had I been more perceptive and more courageous and, last but not least, more sincere.… I have, as a matter of fact, said it, but – you remember? – fearful that you might believe me, that it should really happen; I told you beforehand everything people might say later, so as to prepare you not to listen to them and not to believe them, while I hastened to meet you, thinking that I might as well be happy before the right man came. Such is the logic of infatuation and passion.
‘Now I think differently. What will happen when I grow deeply attached to her, when seeing her is no longer a luxury but a necessity, when