notes from underground

If I were a composer, I could without difficulty write a melody for two voices, a melody that would consist of two lines, of two rows of tunes and notes that correspond with one another, complement one another, fight with one another, limit one another, but in any case at every instant, at every point in the sequence, have a most profound interrelationship and reciprocal effect. And anyone who can read music could read off my double melody and always see and hear with every tone its counter-tone, its brother, its enemy, its opposite. Now it is just this, this double voice and constantly advancing antithesis, this double line, that I would like to express in my own medium, in words, and I work myself to the bone trying and do not succeed. I am always attempting it and if anything at all lends tension and weight to my works, it is this intensive concern for something impossible, this wild battling for something unattainable. I would like to find expression for duality, I would like to write chapters and sentences where melody and counter-melody are always simultaneously present, where unity stands beside every multiplicity, seriousness beside every joke. For to me, life consists simply in this, in the fluctuation between two poles, in the hither and thither between the two foundation pillars of the world. I would like always to point with delight at the many-splendored multiplicity of the world, and just as constantly utter a reminder that oneness underlies this multiplicity; I would like always to show that the beautiful and the ugly, the bright and the dark, sin and holiness are always opposites just for the moment, that they constantly merge into each other. For me the highest utterances of mankind are those few sentences in which this duality has been expressed in magic signs, those few mysterious sayings and parables in which the great world antitheses are recognized simultaneously as necessary and as illusion. The Chinese Lao-tse invented several such sayings in which the two poles of life for a lightning instant seem to touch each other. Even more nobly and simply, even more intimately, this same miracle is performed in many sayings of Jesus. I know nothing in the world so deeply affecting as this, that a religion, a teaching, a school of psychology should through the millennia elaborate the doctrine of good and evil, of right and wrong, constantly more subtly and rigorously, making higher demands on righteousness and obedience, only to end finally at the summit with the magic perception that ninety-nine righteous persons are of less value in the eyes of God than one sinner at the moment of repentance.