You are

mistaken in that, too. I am by no means such a mirthful person as you

imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated by all this babble (and

I feel that you are irritated) you think fit to ask me who I am--then my

answer is, I am a collegiate assessor. I was in the service that I might have

something to eat (and solely for that reason), and when last year a distant

relation left me six thousand roubles in his will I immediately retired

from the service and settled down in my corner. I used to live in this

corner before, but now I have settled down in it. My room is a wretched,

horrid one in the outskirts of the town. My servant is an old country-

woman, ill-natured from stupidity, and, moreover, there is always a nasty

smell about her. I am told that the Petersburg climate is bad for me, and

that with my small means it is very expensive to live in Petersburg. I

know all that better than all these sage and experienced counsellors and

monitors. ... But I am remaining in Petersburg; I am not going away

from Petersburg! I am not going away because ... ech! Why, it is

absolutely no matter whether I am going away or not going away.

But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?

Answer: Of himself.

Well, so I will talk about myself.

II

I want now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not, why

I could not even become an insect. I tell you solemnly, that I have many

times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear,

gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness--a real thorough-going

illness. For man's everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to

have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the

amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy

nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal ill-luck to inhabit

Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole

terrestrial globe. (There are intentional and unintentional towns.) It

would have been quite enough, for instance, to have the consciousness

by which all so-called direct persons and men of action live. I bet you

think I am writing all this from affectation, to be witty at the expense of

men of action; and what is more, that from ill-bred affectation, I am

clanking a sword like my officer. But, gentlemen, whoever can pride

himself on his diseases and even swagger over them?

Though, after all, everyone does do that; people do pride themselves

on their diseases, and I do, may be, more than anyone. We will not

dispute it; my contention was absurd. But yet I am firmly persuaded that

a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a

disease. I stick to that. Let us leave that, too, for a minute. Tell me this:

why does it happen that at the very, yes, at the very moments when I am

most capable of feeling every refinement of all that is "sublime and

beautiful," as they used to say at one time, it would, as though of design,

happen to me not only to feel but to do such ugly things, such that ...

Well, in short, actions that all, perhaps, commit; but which, as though

purposely, occurred to me at the very time when I was most conscious

that they ought not to be committed. The more conscious I was of goodness

and of all that was "sublime and beautiful," the more deeply I sank

into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether. But the

chief point was that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me, but as

though it were bound to be so. It was as though it were my most normal

condition, and not in the least disease or depravity, so that at last all desire

in me to struggle against this depravity passed.