one thing, not one word of what I have
written that I really believe. That is, I believe it, perhaps, but at
the same time I feel and suspect that I am lying like a cobbler.

"Then why have you written all this?" you will say to me. "I ought to
put you underground for forty years without anything to do and then
come to you in your cellar, to find out what stage you have reached!
How can a man be left with nothing to do for forty years?"

"Isn't that shameful, isn't that humiliating?" you will say, perhaps,
wagging your heads contemptuously. "You thirst for life and try to
settle the problems of life by a logical tangle. And how persistent,
how insolent are your sallies, and at the same time what a scare you
are in! You talk nonsense and are pleased with it; you say impudent
things and are in continual alarm and apologising for them. You
declare that you are afraid of nothing and at the same time try to
ingratiate yourself in our good opinion. You declare that you are
gnashing your teeth and at the same time you try to be witty so as to
amuse us. You know that your witticisms are not witty, but you are
evidently well satisfied with their literary value. You may, perhaps,
have really suffered, but you have no respect for your own suffering.
You may have sincerity, but you have no modesty; out of the pettiest
vanity you expose your sincerity to publicity and ignominy. You
doubtlessly mean to say something, but hide your last word through
fear, because you have not the resolution to utter it, and only have a
cowardly impudence. You boast of consciousness, but you are not sure
of your ground, for though your mind works, yet your heart is darkened
and corrupt, and you cannot have a full, genuine consciousness without
a pure heart. And how intrusive you are, how you insist and grimace!
Lies, lies, lies!"

Of course I have myself made up all the things you say. That, too, is
from underground. I have been for forty years listening to you through
a crack under the floor. I have invented them myself, there was
nothing else I could invent. It is no wonder that I have learned it by
heart and it has taken a literary form....

But can you really be so credulous as to think that I will print all
this and give it to you to read too? And another problem: why do I
call you "gentlemen," why do I address you as though you really were my
readers? Such confessions as I intend to make are never printed nor
given to other