I know now what emptiness means. How very weird and strange it is! Emptiness is everywhere; it stretches from the moon, at which I gazed last night, to the English embankment. The houses are full of it; it clings to walls and ceilings; there is not a room that does not contain it; knock down every wall, and nothing will remain between me and the stars but emptiness. + 

I realised this very vividly at dawn yesterday. I had been dreaming that Lidotchka had come to see me, and I awoke. I was too restless to go to sleep again afterwards, so I got up and went into my study, where I sat down on the windowsill. It was getting light, but it was raining, and everything seemed grey and monotonous. There was no beginning or end to anything. It was still and quiet around me. A sense of the emptiness shot through me, of the emptiness within, and the emptiness without, the two stretching together throughout eternity. Emptiness was everywhere; within it was heated, so that people should not perish of the eternal cold. And that thing sitting on the windowsill (I went on thinking) is a man, and the emptiness is all about him. The emptiness that is heated is called a house, and soon I shall have no house.⁠ ⁠… + 

Then I realised where I was. Like a lunatic, once more I was sitting on my windowsill in my pants. My legs seemed so long and my beard so grey. Your end has come, Ilya Petrovitch! + 

I would have gone to bed just now, but the moon peeped in at my window, so I think I’ll go out and look at it, I don’t like having to wake the porter each time I go in and out; I have only the key of our own flat. I shouldn’t like everybody to know if anything happened to me. What a dear boy Jena is! + 