“What of it?”
“It disturbs me—it allows me no rest.”
“Were it to do so, the flame of your candle would soon go out, and you would find yourself in darkness. Ah, Ilya, Ilya! Life passes too swiftly for it to be spent in slumber. Would, rather, it were a perpetual fire!—that one could live for hundreds and hundreds of years! Then what an immensity of work would one not do!”
“You and I are of different types,” said Oblomov. “You have wings; you do not merely exist—you also fly. You have gifts and ambition; you do not grow fat; specks do not dance before your eyes; and the back of your neck does not need to be periodically scratched. In short, my organism and yours are wholly dissimilar.”
“Fie, fie! Man was created to order his own being, and even to change his own nature; yet, instead, he goes and develops a paunch, and then supposes that nature has laid upon him that burden. Once upon a time you too had wings. Now you have laid them aside.”
“Where are they?” asked Oblomov. “I am powerless, completely powerless.”
“Rather, you are determined to be powerless. Even during your boyhood at Oblomovka, and amid the circle of your aunts and nurses and valets, you had begun to waste your intellect, and to be unable to put on your own socks, and so forth. Hence your present inability to live.”
“All that may be so,” said Oblomov with a sigh; “but now it is too late to turn back.”
“And what am I to say to Olga on my return?”
Oblomov hung his head in sad and silent meditation.