Notes from the Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.

Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.

The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was “sublime and beautiful,” the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether.

It was as though it were my most normal condition, and not in the least disease or depravity, so that at last all desire in me to struggle against this depravity passed.

For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive nothing.

Huh remind me of some …

but in spite of all these uncertainties and jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and the more you do not know, the worse the ache.

Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers,

Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever.

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning,

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.

AT THAT TIME I was only twenty-four. My life was even then gloomy, ill-regulated, and as solitary as that of a savage. I made friends with no one and positively avoided talking, and buried myself more and more in my hole.

Lol

But all at once, a propos of nothing, there would come a phase of skepticism and indifference (everything happened in phases to me), and I would laugh myself at my intolerance and fastidiousness, I would reproach myself with being romantic. At one time I was unwilling to speak to anyone, while at other times I would not only talk, but go to the length of contemplating making friends with them.

!!!!!!!

I was a poet and a grand gentleman, I fell in love; I came in for countless millions and immediately devoted them to humanity, and at the same time I confessed before all the people my shameful deeds, which, of course, were not merely shameful, but had in them much that was “sublime and beautiful” something in the Manfred style. Everyone would kiss me and weep (what idiots they would be if they did not), while I should go barefoot and hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against the obscurantists.

I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society.

“But one is sorry.” “Sorry for whom?” “Sorry for life.” Silence.

Love is a holy mystery and ought to be hidden from all other eyes, whatever happens. That makes it holier and better.

The lowest laborer hires himself as a workman, but he doesn’t make a slave of himself altogether;

She understood from all this what a woman understands first of all, if she feels genuine love, that is, that I was myself unhappy.

which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings?

Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books.

We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.