Her words, spoken in a monotonous and hollow voice, stirred Christian deeply, less through their meaning than through his mother’s attitude and gesture--her stern, lost glance, the grief she felt, and the coldness that she feigned. She had found the way to his innermost being, and his great silence was broken. He said: “It isn’t easy to explain the life one lives or the events whose necessity is rooted uncertainly in the past. If I search my own past, I cannot tell where these things had their beginning, nor when, nor how. But let me put it this way: He whom a great glare blinds, desires darkness; he who is satiated finds food distasteful; he who has never lost himself in some cause feels shame and the desire to prove himself. Yet even that does not explain what seems to me the essential thing. You see, mother, the world as I gradually got to know it, the institutions of men, harbours a wrong that is very great and that is inaccessible to our ordinary thinking. I cannot tell you exactly in what this great wrong consists. No man can tell us yet, neither the happy man nor the wretched, neither the learned nor the unlettered one. But it exists, and it meets you at every turn. It does no good to reflect about it. But like the swimmer who strips before he leaps, one must dive to the very bottom of life to find the root and origin of that great wrong. And one can be seized by a yearning for that search, which sweeps away all other interests and ambitions, and masters one utterly. It is a feeling that I could not describe to you, mother, not if I were to talk from now until night. It pierces one through, all one’s soul and all one’s life; and if one strives to withdraw from it, it only becomes keener.” He rose under the impression of the unwonted excitement that he felt, and continued speaking more swiftly. “That wrong does not consist in the mere contrast between poor and rich, between arbitrary licence on the one hand and enforced endurance on the other. No, no. Look, we’ve all grown up with the view that crime meets its expiation, guilt its punishment, that every human deed bears its reward within itself, and that, in a word, a justice rules which compensates, orders, avenges, if not before our eyes, then in some higher region. But that is not true. I believe in no such justice; it does not exist. Nor is it possible that such a justice exists in the universe, for if it did, the lives men lead could not be as they are. And if this superhuman justice of which men speak and on which they rely does not exist, then the source of that great wrong that is in the world must be within the life of man itself, and we must find that source and know its nature. But you cannot find it by observing life from without; you must be within it, within it to the lowest depths. That is it, mother, that is it. Perhaps you understand now.”