notes from underground

With equal caution and casualness I explained that I did not believe in the partial psychic causation of pains and illness, that in my personal biology and mythology the “psychic” was not a kind of auxiliary factor added to the physical but the primary power, and that I therefore regarded every condition of life, every feeling of joy and sorrow as well as every sickness, every misfortune and death as psychogenic, as born out of the soul. If I develop arthritic bumps on my finger joints, it is my soul, it is the revered principle of life, the It in me, that is expressing itself in plastic material. If the soul is suffering, it can say so in very different ways, and what in one person takes the form of uric acid in preparation for the disintegration of the I, can perform this same service in another through alcoholism, in a third it can congeal into an ounce of lead that suddenly crashes into the skull. At the same time I admitted that in most cases the possibilities of help from a doctor must be confined to hunting down the material or secondary changes and combatting them with equally material means.

This is my dilemma and problem. Much can be said about it, but it cannot be solved. To force the two poles of life together, to transcribe the dual voices in life’s melody will never be possible for me. And yet I will follow the dark command within me and will be compelled again and again to make the attempt. This is the mainspring that drives my little clock.

If one takes the sayings of the New Testament not as commandments but as expressions of an extraordinarily profound wisdom about the secrets of our souls, then the wisest saying that was ever uttered, the brief statement of the whole art of living and pursuit of happiness is “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” which, by the way, is to be found in the Old Testament as well. One can love his neighbor less than himself—then he becomes an egoist, a profiteer, a capitalist, a bourgeois, and can, of course, acquire money and power but not a truly happy heart, for the finest, most delicious joys of the soul are locked away from him. Or one can love one’s neighbor more than oneself—then he becomes a poor devil full of inferiority feelings, longing to love everything but still full of rancor and discontent toward himself, and living in a hell that he himself daily makes hotter. On the other hand, the equilibrium of love, the ability to love without being at fault here and there, this love for oneself that is not stolen from anyone, this love for others that does not diminish one’s own I or do violence to it! The secret of all happiness, all blessedness is in this saying. And if one wishes, one can turn it to its Hindu side and give it the meaning: Love your neighbor for he is yourself! A Christian translation of tat tvam asi (that art thou). Ah, all wisdom is so simple, has been so precisely and unambiguously expressed and formulated for so long! Why does it belong to us only at times, only on the good days, why not always?

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.

And so today I stood again for awhile in front of these pictures and since I felt desolation and boredom and a strong, burning desire to get this whole world of doubtless laudable concerts, gamblers, conventional lovers, and turnip pictures behind me, I shut my eyes and in my heart beseeched God for rescue, for I felt that I was not far from an attack of that deep disillusionment and dull disgust with life which, to my sorrow, always overwhelm me just when I am attempting in all good faith and seriousness to eschew my solitary, hermit ways and share the joys and sorrows of the majority.

Today I also spend some minutes in front of the store windows on Badestrasse. In a number of shops there, the guests at the spa can buy those articles that seem to be indispensable to them, postcards, bronze lions and lizards, ashtrays with portraits of famous men (so that the buyer can, for example, amuse himself daily by crushing out his burning cigar in Richard Wagner’s eye), and many other objects about which I venture no opinion since despite long observation I have been unable to fathom their nature and purpose; many of them seem suited to the cult needs of primitive tribes, but this may be a mistake, and all of them together make me sad, for they show me all too clearly that, despite the best will to be sociable, I nevertheless live outside the middle-class real world, know nothing about it, and despite all my years of writing effort, will never really be able to understand it any more than I can make myself understandable to it. When I look into these show windows displaying not things of everyday need but so-called gifts, luxury items, and jokes, then the foreignness of this world horrifies me; among a hundred objects there are twenty or thirty whose intention, meaning, and use I can only vaguely discern, and there is no single one I can imagine worth having. There are some that make me wonder for a long time: Do you put it in your hat? Or in your pocket? Or in a glass of beer? Or does it belong to some king of card game? There are pictures and inscriptions, mottoes and quotations that come from worlds of the imagination completely unknown and inaccessible to me, and again there are the revered and well-known symbols used in a way that I can neither understand nor excuse. The carved figure of Buddha or some Chinese divinity, for example, on the handle of a lady’s parasol is and remains for me puzzling, alien, and distressing, yes, uncanny; it can hardly be a conscious and intentional sacrilege—but what notion, need, or state of soul moves suppliers to make and buyers to purchase these idiotic objects, this is what I would be eager to know and what I cannot in any way discover. Or take a fashionable coffeehouse where people gather around five o’clock! I can fully understand that wealthy people might find pleasure in drinking tea, coffee, and chocolate with whipped cream accompanied by expensive, delicate pastries. But why free men in possession of their faculties should allow their enjoyment of these things to be disturbed by an intrusive, insinuating, oversweet music, by unspeakably uninviting, narrow, and uncomfortable seats in narrow, overfilled rooms crowded with superfluous ornaments and decorations or why they should experience these things not as disturbances, discomforts, and contradictions but rather as something to by liked and sought after—this I shall never fathom, and I have got used to ascribing my failing to my, as remarked, slightly schizophrenic mentality. But again and again it worries me. And the same wealthy and elegant people who sit in these cafés hindered from talking by sticky-sweet music, from thinking, almost from breathing, surrounded by thick clotted luxury, by marble, silver rugs, mirrors, these same people listen in the evening with apparent delight to a lecture about the noble simplicity of the Japanese way of life and have on their tables at home the legends of monks and the sermons of Buddha beautifully printed and bound. I certainly do not wish to be a zealot or a moralist, I am even easily tempted by many daring and dangerous sins, and I am pleased when people are happy, for it is pleasanter to live with happy people—but are these people really happy? Is all the marble, whipped cream, and music really worth anything? Don’t these same people, with plates full of fine, delectable cuisine, set in front of them by liveried servants, don’t they read in their newspapers reports of famine, rebellion, shootings, executions? Beyond the huge plate-glass windows of these coffeehouses is there not a world full of bleeding poverty and despair, full of madness and suicide, fear and horror? Well, yes, I know all this has to be, that all is in some way right, and God wills it so. But it is something I know only in the way one knows the multiplication table. It is not a convincing sort of knowledge. In truth, I find all this not right at all or according to God’s will, but mad and horrible.

…this suffering from insomnia and this morning misery seems to me not just a sickness but also a sin, why I am ashamed of it and yet feel that it must be this way, that I dare not lie away these things or forget them, nor dare I “cure” them by material means, for I need them as incentive and constantly renewed spur to my real life and its task.