self, you will say, and for your
miseries in your underground holes, and don't dare to say all of
us--excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that "all of
us." As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life
carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and
what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have
found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all,
there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully!
Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it
is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in
confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling
to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise.
We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and
blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive
to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and
for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and
that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it.
Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I
don't want to write more from "Underground."

[The notes of this paradoxalist do not end here, however. He could not
refrain from going on with them, but it seems to us that we may stop
here.]

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