i am smart, but you cannot trust me, my words, i am too self-conscious. but im not that aware of how intelligent i am, i promise. its all a farce, i insist- the neurotic thing, i put it on, just a sham, nothing more than an average intelligence exists behind these eyes. there's nothing here for you, really, im not that smart. the only reason i can write this way is because i drank 2 cups of coffee at 9 oclock this morning. no, really, im not that smart. please dont tell me that, i dont need to know that. but i do believe it about myself, but i did not need you to tell me. ive always known. i know im attractive too, but im a little overweight, but please dont tell me that, its all a sham, and i really dont know, im hideously ugly and i play neurotic just to get a reaction because i want to be perceived as a good writer because i dont want to be alone. i know that i wont be alone, though, because i am a attractive person and you will grant me social graces that you will not grant my unattractive counterpart. i will not be lonely because i do not play neurotic around you. i act normal on purpose. i know how to be social. but you would like me anyway, or atleast have a natural predisposition towards liking me, because i am a nice boy who you feel safe around. i pretend we are best friends, and there is nothing you do not know about me. I know that you're a tight-ass so i play the fool around you so that i can laugh to myself and make myself feel that i possess a certain type of unmatched wit so that you will like me, or perhaps so that i will like myself, because, after all, i need to laugh too. i pretend to agree with your horrendously shallow observations about the world in order to fake a level of continuity that was never there. i was searching for someone who understood so i said yes youre right, but deep down i still thought that i was smarter than you. i thought that i was right. but i played the stupid around you so we could be stupid together, and i wanted you to think i was smart so that you would like me so that i could demonstrate my intellectual superiority over you through my amazing rhetoric. and i would write too- these brilliant essays on my opinions of the world- how they were unique and differentiated from my peers, and then i would win awards for these essays, and then i would write essays about how accomplished my essays were, but i would try to downplay it, but i wouldnt downplay it that much, because to really fake humility you have to own it just a little. and then i would write an essay about faking my own humility, and throw everything into question by making you think that i had deceived you into thinking that i was not only a moderately humble human being, but that i actually believed in virtue of humility itself, and thought it somehow attainable. but then you may think me a total nihilist and deconstructionist- that is a part i can play, yes, i can do it, and i will convince you, but you will be shocked when you find out just how wide, just how deep does human deception exist in the level of potential, and it exists in every human being. but see i am getting too smart again, i am expositing, which is what smart people too (and really smart people say that smart people exposit things) and i cannot get too smart or exposit too much, for all my friends would leave me because they cannot understand me, or perhaps they think my ego is overinflated, and i am trying to prove to them that i am smart by writing these silly little essays about god knows what and publishing them in these ridiculously terrible college newspapers. ive run out of things to say about myself, but you must forgive me, there is no one else that i know so well. i tried one time to get to know someone, but she wouldnt let me in. i was smart for a while, but i then i tried dumb, i tried emotional, i think i was, but i wanted her to think me smart so that she would let me get to know her so that she would be with me so that i did not have to be lonely, but it did not work, so i had to come up with some new roles. do you like them?
The underground man is terribly sick, not terribly keen. His taken task -- boring, pathetic, and modern -- is to self-justify his own meaningless saturnine orbit around a meaningful world. I like Joyce's diagnosis of the problem: "it is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god," though it is ultimately too abrasive. T.S. Eliot was more on to the point that the Underground Man was unable to perceive:
ReplyDelete"Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time is time conquered...
After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world."
I guess we all have the freedom to choose whether we will to see the world as the underground man sees it or to see it as faithfully laboring, generally humble inhabitants -- and, more than likely, we slip from one view to the next daily. To pull one last word from one wiser, Oscar Wilde had this to say about these two options: "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope."
sometimes you have to punch the blushing bride in the face.
ReplyDeletefor me, the manifestation of the underground man in this sense represents all the things i witness in myself of which i am most afraid. i am scared, scared most of all that perhaps the nihilists are right- God is dead, there is nothing, there is no truth, etc. so i isolate all of these emotions that i experience and i embellish them on the page, so that all of my burgeoning depravity (and incidentally, the burgeoning depravity of the underground man) is solidified before me in unmistakable clarity and bludgeoning self-honesty. in a word, it is what i am most afraid of becoming. or, to put it another way, it is what i am most afraid of being convinced of, and it reflects the catch 22 that there will be incredibly scary reprecussions if Christianity and/or God is discovered to be a farce, and there will be incredibly scary reprecussions if Christianity is actually true.
ReplyDeleteso here is the underground man, my own harshest critic, and perhaps my own worst enemy, and he had adopted his own identity on the page you see in front of you, and embellishment of my worst fears.