An Existential Life

I’m now asking an idle question of my own: which is better — cheap happiness, or lofty suffering? Well, which is better?
            Such were my reveries as I sat at home that evening, barely alive from the pain in my soul. Never before had I endured so much suffering and repentance; but could there have been even the slightest doubt, as I went running out of the apartment, that I would turn back halfway? Never have I met Liza again, or heard anything about her. I will also add that for a long time I remained pleased with the phrase about the usefullness of insult and hatred, even though I myself almost became sick then from anguish.
            Even now, after so many years, all this comes out somehow none too well in my recollections. Many things come out none too well now in my recollections, but… shouldn’t I just end my Notes here? I think it was a mistake to begin writing them. At least I’ve felt ashamed all the while I’ve been writing this story: so it’s no longer literature, but corrective punishment. Because, for example, to tell long stories of how I defaulted on my life through moral corruption in a corner, through an insufficiency of milleu, through unaccustom to what is alive, and through vainglorious spite in the underground- is not interesting, by God; a novel needs a hero, and here there are purposely collected all the features for an antihero, and, in the first place, all this will produce a most unpleasant impression, because we’ve all grown unaccustomed to life, we’re all lame, each of us more or less. We’ve even grown so unaccustomed that at times we fell a sort of loathing for real “living life,” and therefore cannot bear to be reminded of it. For we’ve reached a point where we regard real “living life” almost as a labor, almost a service, and we all agree in ourselves that it’s better from a book. And why do we sometimes fuss about, why these caprices, these demands of ours? We ourselves don’t know why. It would be the worse for us if our capricious demands were fulfilled. Go on, try giving us more independence, for example, unbind the hands of any one of us, broaden our range of activity, relax the tutelage, and we… but I assure you: we will immediately beg to be taken back under tutelage. I know you’ll probably get angry with me for that, shout, stamp your feet: “Speak just for yourself and your miseries in the underground, and don’t go saying ‘we all’.” Excuse me, gentlemen, but I am not justifiying myself with this allishness. As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and, what’s more, you’ve taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves. So that I, perhaps, come out even more “living” than you. Take a closer look! We don’t even know where the living lives now, or what it is, or what it’s called! Leave us to ourselves, without a book, and we’ll immediately get confused, lost- we won’t know what to join, what to hold to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. It’s a burden for us even to be men- men with real, our own bodies and blood; we’re ashamed of it, we consider it a disgrace, and keep trying to be some unprecendented omni-men. We’re stillborn, and have long ceased to be born of living fathers, and we like this more and more. We’re acquiring a taste for it. Soon we’ll contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don’t want to write any more “from Underground”…

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.