I'm thinking what a happy life my parents lead! At the afe of sixty my father can still find plenty to do, talks about "palliative measures", treats patients, plays the bountiful lord of the manor with the peasants,- has a gay time of it in fact; and my mother's happy too: her days are so chockful of all sorts of occupations, sighs and groans, that she doesn't know where she is; while I..."
"While you?"
"While I think: here I lie under a haystack...The tiny bit of space I occupy is so minute in comparison with the rest of the univserse, where I am not and which is not concerned with me; and the period of tiume in which it is my lot to live is so infinitesimal compared with the eternity in which I have not been and shall not be...And yet, here, in this atom which is myself, in this mathematical point, blood circulates, the brain operates and aspires to something too...What a monstrous business! What futility!"
"Allow me to point our that what you are saying applies generally to everyone..."
"You are right," Bazarov took him up. "I wanted to say that they, my parents, I mean, are so busy, they don't worry about their own insignificance. It doesn't stick in their throat...whereas I...I feel nothing but depression and rancour."
"Rancour? Why rancour?"
"Why? How can you ask why? Have you forgotten?"
"I remember everything but I still can't allow that you have any right to be vexed and angry. You're unhappy, I agree, but..."
"Ugh! I can see, Arkady Nikolaiyevich, that your idea of love is the same as that of all the other young men of this new generation. "Cluck, cluck, cluck," you call to the hen, and the moment the hen comes anywhere near you , you run for your life! I am different. But that's enough of that. What can't be cured must be endured." He turned over on his side. "Aha! there goes a valiant ant dragging off a half-dead fly. Take her away, brother, take her away! Never mind her resistance: avail yourself of your animal right to feel no compassion- not like us poor self-destructive brethren!"