The Black Sage Journal

 Isak stopped reading and set down his novel. Something Ivan said struck him with such honest brutality that he had to sit silent and reflect on it for a moment. During Ivan’s meeting with Alyosha in the Metropolis tavern, before Ivan narrates his now most-famous fable, he tells his younger brother: “I know that my youth will triumph over everything – every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I’ve asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t, that is till I am thirty, and then I shall lose it to myself I fancy. Some driveling consumptive moralist – and poets especially – often call that thirst for life base. It is a feature of the Karamazovs it is true, that thirst for life regardless of everything; you have it no doubt too, but why is it base?” The youthful and triumphant zest for life Isak already understood. But he had not previ...