10 The Brothers Karamazov
it’s become extinct, been frozen; cracked, broken to bits,
disintegrated into its elements, again ‘the water above the
firmament,’ then again a comet, again a sun, again from the
sun it becomes earth — and the same sequence may have
been repeated endlessly and exactly the same to every detail,
most unseemly and insufferably tedious-.’
‘Well, well, what happened when he arrived?’
‘Why, the moment the gates of Paradise were open and
he walked in; before he had been there two seconds, by his
watch (though to my thinking his watch must have long
dissolved into its elements on the way), he cried out that
those two seconds were worth walking not a quadrillion
kilometres but a quadrillion of quadrillions, raised to the
quadrillionth power! In fact, he sang ‘hosannah’ and over-
did it so, that some persons there of lofty ideas wouldn’t
shake hands with him at first — he’d become too rapidly
reactionary, they said. The Russian temperament. I repeat,
it’s a legend. I give it for what it’s worth, so that’s the sort of
ideas we have on such subjects even now.’
‘I’ve caught you!’ Ivan cried, with an almost childish
delight, as though he had succeeded in remembering some-
thing at last. ‘That anecdote about the quadrillion years, I
made up myself! I was seventeen then, I was at the high
school. I made up that anecdote and told it to a schoolfel-
low called Korovkin, it was at Moscow.... The anecdote is so
characteristic that I couldn’t have taken it from anywhere.
I thought I’d forgotten it... but I’ve unconsciously recalled
it — I recalled it myself — it was not you telling it! Thou-
sands of things are unconsciously remembered like that