cloz ’s Reviews > Notes from Underground > Status Update

But how much love, Lord, how much love I experienced in those dreams of mine, in those "escapes into everything beautiful and lofty": though it was a fantastical love, thoughit was never in reality applied to anything human, there was so much of it, this love, that afterwards, in reality, I never even. felt any need to apply it; that would have been an unnecessary luxury.

This was the point, that I blindly believed then that through some mir-acle, some external circumstance, all this would suddenly extend, expand; suddenly a horizon of appropriate activity would present itself, beneficent, beautiful, and, above all, quite ready-made

Dreams came to me with a particular sweetness and intensity after a little debauch, they came with repentance and tears, with curses and ecstasies. There were moments of such positive rapture, such happiness, that not even the slightest mockery could be fetin me, by God. There was faith, hope, love.

On the way up to his fourth-floor apartment, I was precisely thinking that I was a burden to this gentleman and that I shouldn't be going to him.

That is, I by no means went strolling there, but experienced countless torments, humiliations, and risings of bile; that must have been just what I needed.

I could even have forgiven a beating, but I simply could not forgive his moving me and in the end just not noticing me.

in my soul I have never been a coward, though I constantly turned coward in reality, but-don't laugh too quickly, there's an explanation for that; rest assured, I have an explanation for everything.

My debauchery I undertook solitarily, by night, covertly, fearfully, filthily, with a shame that would not abandon me at the most loathsome moments, and at such moments even went so far as a curse. I was then already bearing the underground in my soul. I was terribly afraid of somehow being seen, met, recognized. I used to frequent various rather murky places.

It's perfectly clear to me now that it was I who, owing to my boundless vanity, and hence also my exactingness towards myself, very often looked upon myself with furious dissatisfaction, reaching the point of loathing, and therefore mentally attributed my view to everyone else.

Finally: I'm bored, and I constantly do nothing. And writing things down really seems like work. They say work makes a man good and honest.

You know what, though: I'm convinced that our sort, the underground ones, ought to be kept on a tether. Though we're capable of sitting silently in the underground for forty years, once we do come out and let loose, we talk, talk, talk ...