I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased....
I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official. I was lying from spite. I was simply amusing myself with the petitioners and with the officer, and in reality I never could become spiteful.
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, niether 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.... I am forty years old now.... To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly. I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor; Notes from Underground, I; originally published 1918.
...worthless fellows? ...fools? ...spite? ...honesty? ...amusing?
...words of despair?
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i hated Notes worse than any other dost. i ever read... dream of a ridiculous man was the only bearable thing he ever wrote... Notes was so horrific... omg... i read the introduction four or five times, just to see if the harvard professor who prefaced the work could actually convince me there was any value whatsoever in it... but i concluded it's garbage... and not only garbage... horribly written garbage. argh... and reading crime and punishment is like having an illness... a long, painful illness... in which dost. begins and ends every repetitious sentence with the word "suddenly"... suddenly i suddenly remember suddenly hating dostoevsky with sudden hated... i suddenly mean i hate him suddenly....
:P
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