I calmly continue about people with strong nerves, who do not understand a certain refinement of pleasure. In the face of some mishaps, for example, these gentlemen may bellow at the top of their lungs like bulls, and let's suppose this brings them the greatest honor, but still, as I've already said, they instantly resign themselves before impossibility. Impossibility - meaning a stone wall? What stone wall? Well, of course, the laws of nature, the conclusions of natural science, mathematics. Once it's proved to you, for example, that you descended from an ape, there's no use making a wry face, just take it for what it is. Once it's proved to you that, essentially speaking, one little drop of your own fat should be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow men, and that in this result all so-called virtues and obligations and other ravings and prejudices will finally be resolved, go ahead and accept it, there's nothing to be done, because two times two is - mathematics. Try objecting to that. 5
"For pity's sake," they'll shout at you, "you can't rebeclass="underline" it's two times two is four! Nature doesn't ask your permission; it doesn't care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You're obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well. And so a wall is indeed a wall… etc., etc." My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking? To be sure, I won't break through such a wall with my forehead if I really have not got strength enough to do it, but neither will I be reconciled with it simply because I have a stone wall here and have not got strength enough.
As if such a stone wall were truly soothing and truly contained in itself at least some word on the world, solely by being two times two is four. Oh, absurdity of absurdities! Quite another thing is to understand all, to be conscious of all, all impossibilities and stone walls; not to be reconciled with a single one of these impossibilities and stone walls if you are loath to be reconciled; to reach, by way of the most inevitable logical combinations, the most revolting conclusions on the eternal theme that you yourself seem somehow to blame even for the stone wall, though once again it is obviously clear that you are in no way to blame; and in consequence of that, silently and impo-tently gnashing your teeth, to come to a voluptuous standstill in inertia, fancying that, as it turns out, there isn't even anyone to be angry with; that there is no object to be found, and maybe never will be; that it's all a sleight-of-hand, a stacked deck, a cheat, that it's all just slops - nobody knows what and nobody knows who, but in spite of all the uncertainties and stacked decks, it still hurts, and the more uncertain you are, the more it hurts!
IV
Ha, ha, ha! Next you'll be finding pleasure in a toothache!" you will exclaim, laughing. "And why not? There is also pleasure in a toothache," I will answer. I had a toothache for a whole month; I know there is. Here, of course, one does not remain silently angry, one moans; but these are not straightforward moans, they are crafty moans, and the craftiness is the whole point. These moans express the pleasure of the one who is suffering; if they did not give him pleasure, he wouldn't bother moaning. It's a good example, gentlemen, and I shall develop it. In these moans there is expressed, first, all the futility of our pain, so humiliating for our consciousness, and all the lawfulness of nature, on which, to be sure, you spit, but from which you suffer all the same, while it does not. There is expressed the consciousness that your enemy is nowhere to be found, and yet there is pain; the consciousness that, despite all possible Wagenheims, 6 you are wholly the slave of your teeth; that if someone wishes, your teeth will stop aching, and if not, they will go on aching for another three months; and that, finally, if you still do not agree, and protest even so, then the only consolation you have left is to whip yourself, or give your wall a painful beating with your fist, and decidedly nothing else. Well, sir, it is with these bloody offenses, with these mockeries from no one knows whom, that the pleasure finally begins, sometimes reaching the highest sensuality. I ask you, gentlemen: listen sometime to the moaning of an educated man of the nineteenth century who is suffering from a toothache - say, on the second or third day of his ailment, when he's beginning to moan not as he did on the first day, that is, not simply because he has a toothache, not like some coarse peasant, but like a man touched by development and European civilization, like a man who has "renounced the soil and popular roots," as they say nowadays. 7 His moans somehow turn bad, nastilv wicked, and continue for whole davs and nights. Yet he himself knows that his moans will be of no use to him; he knows better than anyone that he is only straining and irritating himself and others in vain; he knows that even the public before whom he is exerting himself, and his whole family, are already listening to him with loathing, do not believe even a pennyworth of it, and understand in themselves that he could moan differently, more simply, without roulades and flourishes, and that it's just from spite and craftiness that he is playing around like that. Now, it is in all these consciousnesses and disgraces that the sensuality consists. "So I'm bothering you, straining your hearts, not letting anyone in the house sleep. Don't sleep, then; you, too, should feel every moment that I have a toothache. For you I'm no longer a hero, as I once wished to appear, but simply a vile little fellow, a chenapan. 8 Well, so be it! I'm very glad you've gotten to the bottom of me. It's nasty for you listening to my mean little moans? Let it be nasty, then; here's an even nastier roulade for you…" You still don't understand, gentlemen? No, evidently one must attain a profundity of development and consciousness to understand all the curves of this sensuality! You're laughing? I'm very glad. To be sure, gentlemen, my jokes are in bad tone - uneven, confused, self-mistrustful. But that is simply because I don't respect myself. How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?
V
No, how is it possible, how is it at all possible for a man to have the slightest respect for himself, if he has presumed to find pleasure even in the very sense of his own humiliation? I am not speaking this way now out of some cloying repentance. And, generally, I hated saying: "Forgive me, papa, I won't do it again" - not because I was incapable of saying it, but, on the contrary, perhaps precisely because I was all too capable of it. And how! As if on purpose, I used to bumble into it on occasions when I'd never thought or dreamed of doing anything wrong. That was the nastiest thing of all. And there I'd be again, waxing tenderhearted, repenting, shedding tears, and certainly hoodwinking myself, though I wasn't pretending in the least. It was my heart that somehow kept mucking things up… Here even the laws of nature could no longer be blamed, though still, throughout my life, the laws of nature have offended me constantly and more than anything else. It's nasty to look back on it all, and it was nasty then as well. For a minute or so later I'd be reasoning spitefully that it was all a lie, a lie, a loathsome, affected lie - that is, all these repentances, tenderheartednesses, all these vows of regeneration. And you ask why I twisted and tormented myself so? Answer: because it was just too boring to sit there with folded arms, that's why I'd get into such flourishes. Really, it was so. Observe yourselves more closely, gentlemen, and you'll understand that it is so. I made up adventures and devised a life for myself so as to live, at least somehow, a little. How many times it happened to me - well, say, for example, to feel offended, just so, for no reason, on purpose; and I'd know very well that I felt offended for no reason, that I was affecting it, but you can drive yourself so far that in the end, really, you do indeed get offended. Somehow all my life I've had an urge to pull such stunts, so that in the end I could no longer control myself. Another time, twice even, I decided to force myself to fall in love. And I did suffer, gentlemen, I assure you. Deep in one's soul it's hard to believe one is suffering, mockery is stirring there, but all the same I suffer, and in a real, honest-to-god way; I get jealous, lose my temper… And all that from boredom, gentlemen, all from boredom; crushed by inertia. For the direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia - that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms. I've already mentioned this above. I repeat, I emphatically repeat: ingenuous people and active figures are all active simply because they are dull and narrow-minded. How to explain it? Here's how: as a consequence of their narrow-mindedness, they take the most immediate and secondary causes for the primary ones, and thus become convinced more quickly and easily than others that they have found an indisputable basis for their doings, and so they feel at ease; and that, after all, is the main thing. For in order to begin to act, one must first be completely at ease, so that no more doubts remain. Well, and how am I, for example, to set myself at ease? Where are the primary causes on which I can rest, where are my bases? Where am I going to get them? I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. Such is precisely the essence of all consciousness and thought. So, once again it's the laws of nature. And what, finally, is the result? The same old thing. Remember: I was speaking just now about revenge. (You probably didn't grasp it.) I said: a man takes revenge because he finds justice in it. That means he has found a primary cause, a basis - namely, justice. So he is set at ease on all sides and, consequently, takes his revenge calmly and successfully, being convinced that he is doing an honest and just thing. Whereas I do not see any justice here, nor do I find any virtue in it, and, consequently, if I set about taking revenge, it will be solely out of wickedness. Wickedness could, of course, overcome everything, all my doubts, and thus could serve quite successfully in place of a primary cause, precisely in that it is not a cause. But what's to be done if there is also no wickedness in me? (I did begin with that just now.) The spite in me, again as a consequence of those cursed laws of consciousness, undergoes a chemical breakdown. Before your eyes the object vanishes, the reasons evaporate, the culprit is not to be found, the offense becomes not an offense but a fatum, something like a toothache, for which no one is to blame, and, consequently, what remains is again the same way out - that is, to give the wall a painful beating. And so you just wave it aside, because you haven't found the primary cause. But try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms. The day after tomorrow, at the very latest, you'll begin to despise yourself for having knowingly hoodwinked yourself. The result: a soap bubble, and inertia. Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble - that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.