Tortured Soul and a Toothache Contradiction

Listening to: The Fray - How to Save a Life
"Wait, what's the sense in life
Come over me, Come over me...
Then he said,
Here's a riddle for you... Find the Answer.. There's a reason for the world, You and I..."


I am a sick person… I am a spiteful person. I am the most unpleasant person. I think my soul is diseased. Then again, I don't know a thing about my illness; I'm not even sure what hurts. I'm not being treated and never have been, though I respect both medicine and doctors. Besides, I'm extremely superstitious—well at least enough to respect medicine. (I'm sufficiently educated not to be superstitious; but I am, anyway.) Now then, that's something you probably won't understand. Well, I do; I know better than anyone that all this is going to hurt me alone, and no one else. Even so, if I refuse to be treated, it's out of spite. My stomach hurts? Good, let it hurt even more.. I've been living this way for some time after all..

I was lying about myself just now when I said that I was a nasty person. I lied out of spite. I was merely having some fun of being skeptical and fully emotional at the expense of the others, but I could never really become spiteful. At all times I was aware of a great many elements in me that were just the opposite of that. I felt how they swarmed inside me, these contradictory elements. I knew that they had been swarming inside me my whole life and were begging to be let out; but I wouldn't let them out, I wouldn't, I deliberately wouldn't let them out. They tormented me to the point of shame; they drove me to convulsions and—and finally I got fed up with them..

Not only couldn't I become spiteful, I couldn't become anything at all: neither spiteful nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest person, neither a hero nor an insect. Now I live out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent person cannot seriously become anything and that only a fool can become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent person in the twenty first century must be, is morally obliged to be, principally a characterless creature. That's already my conviction at the age of twenty two.

You probably think, people, that I want to amuse you. You're wrong about that. I'm not at all the cheerful fellow I seem to be, or that I may seem to be; however, if you're irritated by all this talk (and I can already sense that you are), then let’s just move on…

Let's consider people who know how to take revenge and how to stand up for themselves in general. How, for example, do they do it? Such an individual simply rushes toward his goal like an enraged bull with lowered horns; only a wall can stop him. Well, then, I consider such a spontaneous individual to be a genuine, normal person, just as tender mother nature wished to see him when she lovingly gave birth to him on earth. I'm green with envy at such a man. He's stupid, I won't argue with you about that; but perhaps a normal man is supposed to be stupid—how do we know? Perhaps it's even very beautiful.

"Ha, ha, ha! You'll be finding enjoyment in a toothache next!" you cry out with a laugh.
"Well, what of it? There is some enjoyment even in a toothache," I reply. "I've had a toothache for a whole month; I know what's what. In this instance, of course, people don't rage in silence; they moan. But these moans are insincere; these moans express the sufferer's enjoyment; if he didn't enjoy it, he would never have begun to moan. In the first place, these moans express all the aimlessness of the pain which consciousness finds so humiliating, the whole system of natural laws about which you really don't give a damn, but as a result of which you're suffering nonetheless, while nature isn't. You yourself know that your moans do you no good; you know better than anyone else that you’re merely irritating yourself and others in vain. They express the consciousness that while there's no real enemy to be identified, the pain exists nonetheless; the awareness that, in spite of all possible Wagenheims, you're still a complete slave to your teeth; that if someone so wishes, your teeth will stop aching, but that if he doesn't so wish, they'll go on aching for three more months; and finally, that if you still disagree and protest, all there's left to do for consolation is flagellate yourself or beat your fist against the wall as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing else.

Are you wondering why on earth I write all these nonsense?? Well yeah, I, too, have been wondering.. I’ve been writing for one and a half hour, all the while abandoning my work, and all of that for what? For it eventually ends up being an utter uselessness, a complete nothingness. My life has always been a contradiction, of course my jokes are in bad taste; they're uneven, contradictory, and lacking in self-assurance. But that's because I have no respect for myself. Can a man possessing consciousness ever really respect himself?

~partly adapted from “Notes from Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
.: This is FeL :.