Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground is such a strange book. I've been trying to read it since I was a teenager in high school, but I could never understand it and always gave up on it after a few pages. Picking it up now, I worry that I am starting to catch up with it as I get older.
"Now I am forty. I used to be in the government service, but am no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it out on purpose!)..."
"It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral."
Not that I am particularly rude or spiteful or full of disdain, but some of that does strike a chord. Especially the part about being neither hero or insect by forty.
I don't think I'll finish reading the book this time around either. Too unsettling. Maybe it will be easier to take when I'm closing in on fifty instead of forty?
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