Notes from Underground

"I will go quietly on about the people with strong nerves, who don't understand certain refinements of pleasure. These gentlemen, although they roar full-throatedly like bulls, and I suppose it does them the greatest credit, will on some occasions, as i have already said, calm down at once when they are faced with an impossibility. Impossibility is a stone wall. What do I mean by a stone wall? Well, of course, the laws of nature or the conclusions of the natural sciences or of mathematics. When it is proved, for example, that you are descended from an ape, it's no use scowling about it -- accept it as a fact. Or if it is demonstrated that half an ounce of your own fat ought essentially to be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this demonstration finally disposes of all so-called good deeds, duties, and other lunacies and prejudices, simply accept it; there's nothing to be done about it, because twice two is mathematics. Just try to argue!

'Excuse me,' they cry, 'you can't fight it; twice two is four! Nature doesn't ask you about it; she's not concerned with your wishes or with whether you like her laws or not. You must take her as she is, and consequently all her results as well. I mean to say, a wall is a wall,' etc., etc. But good God! what have the laws of nature and arithmetic to do with me, when for some reason  I don't like those laws or twice two? Naturally I shan't break through the wall with my head, if I'm really not strong enough, but I won't be reconciled to it simply because it's a stone wall and I haven't enough strength to break it down.

 As if a stone wall really was a soothing influence and really did carry a message of peace, simply because it is twice two! That's utterly absurd! The point is to understand everything, to realize everything, every impossibility, every stone wall; not to reconcile yourself to a single one of the impossibilities and stone walls if the thought of reconciliation sickens you; to arrive by way of the strictest logical syllogisms at the most repulsive conclusions on the eternal theme of how you are somehow to blame for the stone wall itself, even though once again it is abundantly clear that you are not to blame at all, and in consequence of all this to sink voluptuously into inertia, silently and impotently gnashing your teeth and reflecting that there isn't even anybody for you to be angry with, that an object for your anger can't even be found, and perhaps never will be, that  this is all a fake, a conjuring trick, a piece of sharp practice, and there is nothing there but a morass; nobody knows what, nobody knows who, but in spite of all the mysteries and illusions, you ache with it all, and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache."

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground