Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, Part I, Chapters 1, 2, 3
100 Days of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment September 1 - December 10, 2024
100 Days of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment
September 1 - December 10, 2024
Notes from Underground (Записки из подполья)
September 11
Part I, Chapters 1, 2, 3
Next passage:
September 12
Part I, Chapters 4, 5, 6
Have you ever felt spiteful? Acted on this impulse? Acted spiteful out of spite - and not out of any well reasoned inclinations? Have you ever rattled the proverbial sabre at the world while feeling sorry for yourself? Convinced yourself that this is the worst time pretty much EVER and no one has ever been as miserable as you are at the moment? Made decisions that are counterintuitive and harmful - and then convinced yourself that your decisions were well reasoned and wise? Spent the day badly, wastefully, perhaps even shamefully - but engaged in mental gymnastics to rationalize your actions? Ate a slice of cake instead of a kale salad - and spent a good half hour justifying yourself?
If you are willing to admit that if pushed into the proverbial corner you would have to confess your guilt on at least one of these charges - then welcome to the proverbial corner!!! Welcome to the underground!!!
And when you are just about done brooding over the injustice and unfairness of it all and the immovable laws of nature that prevent your autonomous progress through life - you are stuck with your own infuriating impotence in the face of immutable reality that leaves you only with one option - to give the wall a painful beating!!! Does this senseless action resolve any of the insurmountable obstacles you face in life? Not at all!!! Ah, but at least you can say that you are a person of action!!!
NOW does the underground man make sense?! The one whose liver hurts - but who won’t see a doctor - not out of laziness or superstition - but out of sheer spite! Let it hurt! So there!
How rational is any of this?! Not at all - but there you have it - welcome to your own humanity!!!
“But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness? The whole thing precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it. I'm foaming at the mouth, but bring me some little doll, give me some tea with a bit of sugar, and maybe I'll calm down. I'll even wax tenderhearted, though afterwards I'll certainly gnash my teeth at myself and suffer from insomnia for a few months out of shame.”
And so our morbidly self conscious hero - or insect as the case may be - reserves the right to hurl his opinions at the world - whether the world is interested in them or not!!!
“Not just wicked, no, I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure primarily a limited being.”
And so he lives on - past forty, or even past sixty - OR EVEN eighty - in his corner - in the most “intentional” city ever, Saint Petersburg, willed into being by the sheer strength of Peter the Great’s convictions - plunging its inhabitants into the misery reserved for all the dwellers of urban places which are way too expensive and unhealthy for habitation - but we won’t move out of them - out of sheer spite!!!
And so we live, drowning in the inertia of our own inaction, swelling with the sense of our own self importance, loving our own far more than humanity in general - while making useless pronouncements about all things beautiful and lofty - while cursing the unrelenting inevitability of such monoliths as 2x2 - and talking, talking, talking breathlessly about what else - ourselves!!!
Does the Underground Man contradict himself? All the time!!! Do we contradict ourselves?! Daily!!! As I already mentioned - welcome to the underground!!! But first, let me catch my breath!!! Till tomorrow!!!
Winter Canal, Saint Petersburg.
