Real life

"After all, to tell a long story about how I missed life through decaying morally in a corner, not having sufficient means, losing the habit of living, and carefully cultivating my anger underground – really is not interesting: a novel needs a hero, but here all the features of an anti-hero have purposely been collected, and most of all, the whole thing produces a bad impression, because we have all got out of the habit of living, we are in a greater or lesser degree crippled. We are so unused to living that we often feel something like loathing for ‘real life’ and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. We have really gone so far as to think of ‘real life’ as toil, almost as servitude, and we are all agreed, for our part, that it is better in books. And what is it we sometimes scratch about for? We don’t know ourselves. And it would be worse for us if our stupid whims were indulged. Just try giving us, for example, as much independence as possible, untie the hands of any one of us, loosen our bonds, and we… I assure you we should all immediately beg to go back under discipline. I know that you may be angry with me for saying this, you will cry out against me and stamp your foot: ‘You are talking only about yourself and your underground miseries, don’t dare speak of “all of us!” Excuse me, gentlemen, I am not trying to excuse myself with that allness. As for what concerns me personally, after all I have only carried to a logical conclusion in my life what you yourselves didn’t dare take more than half way; and you supposed your cowardice was common sense, and comforted yourselves with the self-deception. So perhaps I turn out to be more alive than you. Look harder! After all, we don’t even know where ‘real life’ is lived nowadays, or what it is, what name it goes by. Leave us to ourselves, without our books, and at once we get into a muddle and lose our way – we don’t know whose side to be on or where to give our allegiance, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We even find it difficult to be human beings, men with real flesh and blood of our own; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace, and are always striving to be some unprecedented kind of generalized human being. We are born dead, and moreover we have ceased to be the sons of living fathers; and we become more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it. Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea. But that’s enough; I shall write no more from the underground…”[1]

[1] Dostoevsky Notes from Underground translated by Jessie Coulson (Harmondsworth 1972) pp 122-123