IV
"Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," youcry, with a laugh.
"Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I hadtoothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, ofcourse, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are notcandid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the wholepoint. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans;if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a goodexample, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in thefirst place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliatingto your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which youspit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the samewhile she does not. They express the consciousness that you have noenemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that inspite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to yourteeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, andif he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and thatfinally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that isleft you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat yourwall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more.Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown,end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degreeof voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moansof an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache,on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan,not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he hastoothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected byprogress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from thesoil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. Hismoans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole daysand nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself nosort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he isonly lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knowsthat even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and hiswhole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth offaith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently,more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusinghimself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all theserecognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure.As though he would say: "I am worrying you, I am lacerating yourhearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awakethen, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache. I am not ahero to you now, as I tried to seem before, but simply a nasty person,an impostor. Well, so be it, then! I am very glad that you seethrough me. It is nasty for you to hear my despicable moans: well, letit be nasty; here I will let you have a nastier flourish in aminute...." You do not understand even now, gentlemen? No, it seemsour development and our consciousness must go further to understandall the intricacies of this pleasure. You laugh? Delighted. Myjests, gentlemen, are of course in bad taste, jerky, involved, lackingself-confidence. But of course that is because I do not respectmyself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all?
Notes from the Underground Page 4
