“No, shame and sorrow. Ah, life, life!” “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. “Say nothing,” at length he said. “Or say that you have not seen me....” A year and a half later Oblomov was sitting in his dull, murky rooms. He had now grown corpulent, and from his eyes _ennui_ peered forth like a disease. At intervals, too, he would rise and pace the room, then lie down again, then take a book from the table, read a few lines of it, yawn, and begin drumming with his fingers upon the table’s surface. As for Zakhar, he was more seedy and untidy than ever. The elbows of his coat were patched, and he had about him a pinched and hungry air, as though his appetite were bad, his sleep poor, and his work three times as much as it ought to have been. Oblomov’s dressing-gown also was patched: yet, carefully though the holes had been mended, the seams were coming apart in various places. Likewise the coverlet of the bed was ragged, while the curtains, though clean, were faded and hanging in strips. Suddenly the landlady entered to announce a visitor, and also to say that it was neither Tarantiev nor Alexiev. “Then it must be Schtoltz again!” thought Oblomov, with a sense of horror. “What can he want with me? However, it does not matter.” “How are you?” inquired Schtoltz when he entered the room. “You have grown stout, yet your face is pale.”