Bazarov was silent for a while. “Do you know what I’m thinking about?” he said at last, clasping his hands behind his head.
“No. What is it?”
“I’m thinking how happy life is for my parents! My father at the age of sixty can fuss around, chat about ‘palliative measures,’ heal people; he plays the magnanimous master with the peasants—has a gay time in fact; and my mother is happy too; her day is so crammed with all sorts of jobs, with sighs and groans, that she hasn’t a moment to think about herself; while I… .”
“While you?”
“While I think; here I lie under a haystack . . . The tiny narrow space I occupy is so minutely small in comparison with the rest of space where I am not and which has nothing to do with me; and the portion of time in which it is my lot to live is so insignificant beside the eternity where I have not been and will not be . . . And in this atom, in this mathematical point, the blood circulates, the brain works and wants something . . . how disgusting! how petty!”
“Allow me to point out that what you say applies generally to everyone.”
“You’re right,” interrupted Bazarov. “I wanted to say that they, my parents I mean, are occupied and don’t worry about their own nothingness; it doesn’t sicken them . . . while I . . . I feel nothing but boredom and anger.”
--- Turgenev, “Fathers and Sons”