Notes From The Underground | Page 6

The worst of it is, look at it which way one will, it still turns out that I
was always the most to blame in everything. And what is most humiliating of all, to
blame for no fault of my own but, so to say, through the laws of nature. In the first place,
to blame because I am cleverer than any of the people surrounding me. (I have always
considered myself cleverer than any of the people surrounding me, and sometimes, would
you believe it, have been positively ashamed of it. At any rate, I have all my life, as it
were, turned my eyes away and never could look people straight in the face.) To blame,
finally, because even if I had had magnanimity, I should only have had more suffering
from the sense of its uselessness. I should certainly have never been able to do anything
from being magnanimous--neither to forgive, for my assailant would perhaps have
slapped me from the laws of nature, and one cannot forgive the laws of nature; nor to
forget, for even if it were owing to the laws of nature, it is insulting all the same. Finally,
even if I had wanted to be anything but magnanimous, had desired on the contrary to
revenge myself on my assailant, I could not have revenged myself on any one for
anything because I should certainly never have made up my mind to do anything, even if
I had been able to. Why should I not have made up my mind? About that in particular I
want to say a few words.

III
With people who know how to revenge themselves and to stand up for themselves in
general, how is it done? Why, when they are possessed, let us suppose, by the feeling of
revenge, then for the time there is nothing else but that feeling left in their whole being.
Such a gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull with its
horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him. (By the way: facing the wall, such
gentlemen--that is, the "direct" persons and men of action--are genuinely nonplussed. For
them a wall is not an evasion, as for us people who think and consequently do nothing; it
is not an excuse for turning aside, an excuse for which we are always very glad, though
we scarcely believe in it ourselves, as a rule. No, they are nonplussed in all sincerity. The
wall has for them something tranquillising, morally soothing, final-- maybe even
something mysterious ... but of the wall later.)
Well, such a direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his tender mother nature
wished to see him when she graciously brought him into being on the earth. I envy such a
man till I am green in the face. He is stupid. I am not disputing that, but perhaps the
normal man should be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it is very beautiful, in fact. And

I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can call it so, by the fact that if you take,
for instance, the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness,
who has come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort (this is almost
mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this retort-made man is sometimes so
nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness he
genuinely thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man. It may be an acutely conscious
mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and therefore, et caetera, et caetera.
And the worst of it is, he himself, his very own self, looks on himself as a mouse; no one
asks him to do so; and that is an important point. Now let us look at this mouse in action.
Let us suppose, for instance, that it feels insulted, too (and it almost always does feel
insulted), and wants to revenge itself, too. There may even be a greater accumulation of
spite in it than in L'HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE. The base and nasty
desire to vent that spite on its assailant rankles perhaps even more nastily in it than in
L'HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE. For through his innate stupidity the
latter looks upon his revenge as justice pure and simple; while in consequence of his
acute consciousness the mouse does not believe in the justice of it. To come at last to the
deed itself, to the very act of revenge. Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the
luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses