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oh i see.

7.09.2008

23:53

"those groans are an expression of the sufferer's pleasure" - Fëdor Mihajlovic Dostoevskij, Notes from Underground

ok i shall practise my typing..here it goes..

'Ha, ha, ha! After that, you will be looking for pleasure even in toothache!' you will exclaim, laughing.
'Why not? There is pleasure even in toothache,' I shall reply, I once had toothache for a whole month, so I know what I'm talking about. People don't suffer that in silence, of course, they groan; but the groans aren't straightforward and honest, they are spiteful, and the spite is the whole point of them. Those groans are an expression of the sufferer's pleasure; if he didn't enjoy them he would stop groaning. This is a good example, and I will develop it. The groans are an expression, to begin with, of all the pointlessness, which the conscious mind finds so humiliating, of your pain; it's a law of nature, for which, of course, you feel the utmost contempt, but from which you nevertheless suffer, which she doesn't. They express your awareness of the fact that nobody has inflicted the pain on you and yet you feel it, your awareness that in spite of all the Wagenheims you are utterly at the mercy of you teeth; that if something wills it, they will stop aching, and if it doesn't they will go on aching for another three months; and finally, that even if you still object and try to protest, your only satisfaction will be lashing your own back or running your head even more painfully against your stone wall, and that's absolutely all! Well, it is from those bloody wrongs, these practical jokes of an unidentifiable jester, that pleasure finally arises, pleasure that sometimes attains the utmost rapture. I ask you to listen some time to the groaning of a cultured man of the nineteenth century who has been suffering from toothache for two or three days, and whose groans are beginning to be different from those of the first day; that is, he is not groaning simply because his teeth ache, nor like a coarse peasant, but like a man touched by enlightenment and European civilisation, like a man who has 'cut himself off from the soil and his roots among the people', as they say nowadays. His groans have become something vicious and maliciously nasty, and they go on all day and all night. And yet he knows perfectly well that his groans won't do the slightest good, he knows better than anybody else that he is harrowing and irritating himself and everybody else for nothing; he realises that even the audience for which he is performing, even his own family, are sick of listening to him, they don't believe a word of it, and they know in their hearts that he could very well groan in another, simpler fashion, without roulades and flourishes, and is merely indulging himself out of spite and ill humour. Well, the pleasure lies in all this conscious shamefulness. 'I'm disturbing you,' he seems to say, 'I'm lacerating your feelings and preventing everybody in the house from sleeping. Well, don't sleep, then; you ought to be feeling my toothache all the time. I'm not a hero to you any longer, as I used to try to seem, but only a worthless good-for-nothing. All right, then! I'm very glad you've seen through me. You don't like to hear my mean-spirited moans, do you? Dislike them then; now I'll treat you to an even more harrowing performance....' Do you understand yet, gentlemen? Yes, evidently one must be highly developed and deeply conscious of oneself to understand all the devious ins and outs of that voluptuous delight....Are you laughing? I'm very glad. My jokes are in bad taste, of course, gentlemen, uneven, confused, full of self-distrust. But that, you know, comes from having no respect for myself. Can a thinking man have any self-respect whatever?

wanted to quote it..somewhere..but it wouldn't be half as delightful..haha
so, people, indulge in this pleasure, keep groaning.
(it always amuses me; weird people, thinking weird, writing weird.) GOOD