Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground

Aw, the genius does it again. Flattens me with such excellent writing and psychological description for the second time this year. Reread this little dark piece after uhh 6 years. Appreciated it much more this time. I can actually relate this time. I was so untainted at the docile age of 16. SIGH. But God has a plan and these things have transpired for a reason. now for the endless quotations. I want to write them. You don't have to read them if you don't want to, but I promise it's worth it:

"My room is wretched, bad, on the edge of the city... Petersburg (the most abstract and intentional city on the entire globe) climate is beginning to do me harm... to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.. the more conscious I was of the good and of all this beautiful and lofty, the deeper I kept sinking into my mire, and the more capable of getting completely stuck in it.. finally lost any wish to struggle against this blight. I ended up almost (and maybe indeed) believing that this perhaps was my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, how much torment I endured in this struggle.

I was ashamed (am ashamed even now); it reached the point with me where I would feel some secret, abnormally mean little pleasure in returning to my corner on some most nasty Petersburg night and being highly conscious of having once again done a nasty thing that day and again that.. could in no way be undone, and I would gnaw at myself inwardly, secretly, tear and suck at myself until the bitterness finally turned into some shameful, accursed sweetness and finally-- into a serious decided pleasure!... the pleasure here lay precisely in the too vivid consciousness of one's humiliation; in feeling that one had reached the ultimate wall; that, bad as it is, it cannot be otherwise; that there is no way out for you, that you will never change into a different person, that even if you had enough time and faith left to change yourself in to something different you probably wouldn't wish to change; and even if you did wish it, you would still not do anything... the pleasure of despair... it is in despair that the most burning pleasures occur, especially when one is all too hightly conscious of the hopelessness of one's position... simply be crushed by the consciousness of the sort of slime you've been reduced to...

But it is precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief,, in this conscious burying oneself alive from grief for forty years in the underground, in this assiduously produced and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness of one's position, in all this poison of unsatisfied desires penetrating inward, in all this fever of hesitations, of desicious taken forever, and repentences coming again a moment later, that the very sap of that strage pleasure I was taking about consists. It is so subtle, sometimes so elusive of consciouosness that people who are even the slightest bit narrow-minded or who simply have strong nerves, will not understand a single trace of it... it was my heart that somehow kwpt mucking things up.. and you ask why I twisted and tormented myself so?.. curshed by inirtia.. a deliberate pouring from empty into void...

I would be a lazybones and a glutton, and not just an ordianry one, but, for example, one sympathizing with everything beautiful and lofty.. golden dreams.. did not want the designed path, and stubbornly, willfully pushed off onto another one, difficult, absurd, searching for it in the dark... though chaffed sometimes to the point of madness...a being who goes on two legs and is ungrateful... his chiefest defect is his constant lack of good behaviour... There constantly appear in life people of such good behavior and good sense, such sages and lovers of mankind as precisely make it their goal to spend their entire lives in the best behaved and most sensible way possible, to become, so to speak, a light for thier neighbors, essentially in order to prove to them that one can ideed live in the world as a person of good behaviour and good sense. And what then? It is know that sooner or later.. many of these lovers have betrayed themselves, producing some anecdote, sometimes even of the most indecent sort..

shower him with all earthly blessings, drown him in happiness completely, over his head.. it is just here that his man, out of sheer ingratitude witll do something nasty.. I am tormented by questions.. man loves the creating and making or roads.. but why does he som passionately love destruction and chaos as well? .. Maybe man loves suffering just as much (as well being). Mybe suffering is just as profitable for him as well-being. Suffering, why this is the sole cause of consciousness. It may be retrograde, but still it's better than nothing.. you thirst for life, yet you yourself revolve life's questions with a logical tangle. And how importunate, how impudent your escapades, yet at the same time how frightened you are!.. you may indeed have happened to suffer, but you do not have the least respect for your suffering...

In every man's memories there are such things as he will reveal not to everyone, but perhaps only to friends. There are also such as he will reveal not even to friends but only to himself and that in secret. Then, finally, there are such as a man is afraid to reveal even to himself, and evey decent man will have accumulated quite a few things of this sort. That is one might even say: the more decent a man is, the more of them he will have... Snow is falling today, almost wet, yellow, dull. And it way falling yesterday, and it was falling the other day as well. I think it was apropos of the wet snow that I recalled this anecdote that now refused to be gotten rid of...

At that time I was only 24 years old. My life then was already gloomy, disorderly, and solitary to the point of savagery.. and shrank more and more into my corner. I even tried not to look at anyone... owing to my boundless vanity, and hence also my exactingness towards myself, very often looked upon myself with furious dissatisfaction, reaching the point of loathing, and therefore mentally attributed my view to everyone else with certainty and suffering... Things were somehow sudden with me in those days... A developed and decent man cannot be vain without a boundless exactingness towards himself and without despising himself at moments to the point of hatred.. this tormented me to the point of fury.. no one else was like me and I was like no one else.. I'd fall to thinking.. Reading was of course a great help. It stirred, delighted, and tormented me.. My debauchery I undertook solitartily by night, covertly, fearfully, filthily, with a shame that would not abandon me at the most loathsome moments.. I was then already bearing the underground in my soul. I was terribly afraid of somehow being seen.. anguish can eat a man into such hysterics.. I was not drunk.. the next day continued my little debauch still more timidly, downtroddenly, and sadly than before as if with a tear in my eye-- yet i continued...

Then the spell of my little debauch would end, and I’d feel terribly nauseated. Repentance would come; I’d drive it away—it was too nauseating. Little by little, however, I’d get used to that as well. I could get used to anything—that is not really get used, but somehow voluntarily consent to endure it. But I had a way out that reconciled everything, which was – to escape into ‘everything beautiful and lofty’ in dreams of course.
.. what these dreams were and how I could have been satisfied by them—is difficult to say now, but I was satisfied with them then. However, I’m somewhat satisfied with them even now. Dreams come to me with a particular sweetness and intensity after a little debauch, they came with repentance and tears, curses and raptures… consisted of contradiction and suffering, of tormenting inner analysis… everything, however, would always end most happily with a lazy and rapturous transition to art--… that night I had the most hideous dreams. No wonder: all evening I was oppressed by recollections... so little interest in the most impressive startling subjects.. they understood nothing, no real life… But there were thousands of such main things, and they all agitated my to the point of impotence... now comes reality I thought, and my heart sank. I also knew perfectly well, even then, that I was monstrously exaggerating all these facts, but there was nothing to be done... In inexpressible anguish I kept going to the window, opening the vent, and peering into the dull darkness of thickly falling wet snow. At last my wretched little wall clock hissed five…

Every once in awhile a thought pierced my heart with the deepest, most poisonous pain; that ten years, twenty years, forty years would pass, and even after forty years, I would still recall with revulsion and humiliation those dirtiest, most ridiculous, and most terrible minutes of my entire life... I suddenly felt cold all over... wet snow was falling in thick flakes… there was something simple-hearted and kind in that face, yet serious to the point of strangeness... beautiful eyes, alive, capable of reflecting both love and sullen hatred… My head was still aching and dizzy from yesterday... But the more evening advanced and the twilight thickened, the more my impressions and after them my thoughts as well, kept changing and tangling. Something within me deep in my heart and conscience would not die, refused to die, and betrayed itself in burning anguish... I simply could not get hold of myself, could not find the loose ends. Something in my soul was rising, rising, ceaselessly, painfully, and refused to be still… It was still, and the snow was falling heavily, almost perpendicularly, laying a pillow over the sidewalk and the deserted roadway. Not a single passer-by, not a sound to be heard. The streetlamps flickered glumly and uselessly… I stood in the snow, peering into the dull darkness, and thought about that… stifling the living pain in my heart with fantasies... such were my reveries as I sat at home that evening, barely alive from the pain in my soul…."