Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 📚
Each time I picked this up it took a bit to get into the rhythm (a Russian lit thing?) but it quickly pulled me along. At least until I couldn’t stand the obnoxious narrator anymore (which is the conceit of the book, so…).
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.
for what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?
reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses.
our personality, our individuality. Some, you see, maintain that this really is the most precious thing for mankind;
Reading, of course, was a great help—exciting me, giving me pleasure and pain. But at times it bored me fearfully.
man is fond of reckoning up his troubles, but does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
“It’s by pictures, pictures like that one must get at you,”
I was angry with myself, but, of course, it was she who would have to pay for it.
I was, of course, myself the chief sufferer, because I was fully conscious of the disgusting meanness of my spiteful stupidity, and yet at the same time I could not restrain myself.
We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it.