Thoughts on Notes from the Underground

One of my favorite quotes on reading came from Will Smith:

there have been gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There's no new problem you could have--with your parents, with school, with a bully. There's no new problem that someone hasn't already had and written about it in a book.

It's just so true. Finding the right text makes you realize you're not alone in this world. Our experiences are more universal than we think. To have this small feeling of camaraderie, of understanding when you're feeling alone makes all the difference.

Notes from the Underground was one such book for me. I saw so much of myself from once upon a time in Dostoevsky's words.

To be seen

I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way

Why? Why, the place is waterlogged. It’s a regular marsh. So they bury them in water. I’ve seen it myself ... many times.” (I had never seen it once, indeed I had never been in Volkovo, and had only heard stories of it.)

That I posed as such a hero to you, and now you would see me in a wretched torn dressing- gown, beggarly, loathsome.

I have lied knowing about things I knew nothing of, pretending to be smarter than I was, speaking only to sound clever just for someone to recognize me as clever. It's always a desperate grasp to be noticed, because I myself didn't think that I was worthy of it.

I could have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me without noticing me.

A secondhand life

Why, you ... speak somehow like a book

I think this is a widespread phenomenon today. It's a side effect of living life through words, or pictures or just anything consumed. We don't know how something feels like, we talk of them as ideas, almost like something abstract. There feels something unreal about it.

How life breeds cruelty

The poor girl was keeping that student’s letter as a precious treasure, and had run to fetch it, her only treasure, because she did not want me to go away without knowing that she, too, was honestly and genuinely loved; that she, too, was addressed respectfully. No doubt that letter was destined to lie in her box and lead to nothing. But none the less, I am certain that she would keep it all her life as a precious treasure, as her pride and justification, and now at such a minute she had thought of that letter and brought it with naive pride to raise herself in my eyes that I might see, that I, too, might think well of her.

The reaction of the Underground man to this is haunting to me because I felt so close to feeling like this at one point in my life. That point where you see someone at their most vulnerable and instead of empathy you have this urge to crush them, I think that's the lowest I had ever been.

To want that is the final fall of a life where in the absence of connection, praise and validation a person turns to cruelty. He desires to feel superior to someone, but this action just reinforces how horrible of a person he's become.

by then I was incapable of love, for I repeat, with me loving meant tyrannising and showing my moral superiority. I have never in my life been able to imagine any other sort of love, and have nowadays come to the point of sometimes thinking that love really consists in the right— freely given by the beloved object— to tyrannise over her.

Living in my head

I even sometimes began dreaming, and rather sweetly: I, for instance, became the salvation of Liza, simply through her coming to me and my talking to her.... I develop her, educate her. Finally, I notice that she loves me, loves me passionately. I pretend not to understand (I don’t know, however, why I pretend, just for effect, perhaps). At last all confusion, transfigured, trembling and sobbing, she flings herself at my feet and says that I am her saviour, and that she loves me better than anything

Because I only like playing with words, only dreaming,

I was so accustomed to think and imagine everything from books, and to picture everything in the world to myself just as I had made it up in my dreams beforehand

This habit of daydreaming, fantasizing of an alternate life where I am someone different was so addicting to me before that it was debilitating. I struggle with it today too. I constructed such elaborate lives for the me in these dream worlds, and would spend hours and hours in bed just in my head.

It's escapism, and feels so comforting in the bad moments, like a safe hug. I needed it on some days, even if it so often crossed the boundary to being bad for my long term goals. Even today sometimes it's the only way I know to cope with some days.

How I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world