luminiferous ether

“For the entire journey he went over everything the docotor had said, incessantly trying to translate  all those tangled, obscure technical terms into plain language and to decipher from them the answers to his question: it is bad—but is it very bad for me or not so bad yet? And it seemed to him that the implication of everything the doctor had said was that it was very bad. Everything in the streets seemed sad to Ivan Ilyich. The coachmen were sad, the houses were sad, the passersby and the shops were sad. And that dull, gnawing pain that never eased seemed to take on a different, more serious significance from the doctor’s obscure pronouncements. Ivan Ilyich attended to it with a new feeling of heaviness.”

(from Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”)