Michael > Recent Status Updates

"Indeed it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one's own family members might get blow to pieces on a trip to the grocery store." It's almost like justifying violence is generally bad and comes from a place of ignorance.

"Is it possible to bear witness to the fact that I ended up despising my own body, the very physical stuff of my self? That I will fully destroy the warmth, any affection whose intensity was more than I could bear, and ran away? To somewhere colder, somewhere safer. Purely to stay alive.”

"Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person."

"She had no faith in humanity. The look in someone's eyes, the beliefs they espoused, the eloquence of which they did so, were, she knew, no guarantee of anything. She knew the only life left to her was one hemmed in by niggling doubts and cold questions."

"There will be no forgiveness. Least of all for me."

25 pages in and it is quite clear this intends to be a raw, confrontational novel. Not a surprise considering it was written in the aftermath of South Korea electing the daughter of the country's former tyrannical President.

"Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.”

"A bad man in this connection, is the lover of the common type, who loves the body rather than the mind. He is not constant: as soon as the bloom of the body fades, which is what attracted him, "he flies away and is gone," bringing disgrace on all he said and promised. But the man who loves goodness of character is constant throughout his life, since he has become united with something constant."

"On the contrary, they took the most obvious, glaring reality in a fantastically stupid way, and were already accustomed to worshiping success alone. Everything that was just, but humiliated and downtrodden, they laughed at disgracefully and hardheartedly. They regarded rank as intelligence; at the age of sixteen they were already talking about cushy billets...They were depraved to the point of monstrosity."

An incredible density of observations about the human psyche can be found in a mere 20 pages or so. The underground man points out that humans, while suffering from pain, also derive pleasure out of it. That we nurse our wounds and flaunt them at the same time. He lambasts utopianism, determinism and the idea that our purpose (if such a thing exists) would be rational. Clear to see how he influenced existentialism.