finding home

I was intending, a while ago, to post the bits of Notes from Underground that I found the most relevant and stimulating, but upon reading most of it I realized that I would just have to post the whole thing. In only posting these few lines I am not doing justice to these essays at all. I would suggest to everyone who hasn't read this work to go read it. I found it infinitely better than Dostoevsky's fiction, and I really like his fiction.

These are the two parts I will post though:
"In spite of all these uncertanties and jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and the more you do not know, the worse the ache." (From III)
"You think, gentlemen, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to defend myself. I agree that man is pre-eminately a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering- that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is predestined to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid that "direct" practial man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always does lead somewhere, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices. Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also? Tell me that! But on that point I want to say a couple of words myself. May it not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want to live in it, but will leave it, when completed, for the use of les animaux domestiques- such as the ants, the sheep, and so on. Now the ants have quite a different taste. They have a marvellous edifice of that pattern with endures for ever- the ant-heap. ....Granted that man does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrfices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, he dreads, I assure you. He feels that when eh has found i there will be nothing for him to look for."

I cannot tell you how happy I am that at the end of this long succession of philosophers I have been reading I found Notes from Underground. Whereas in most philosophers I saw confusion, contradiction, doubt, and some vague vain attempt, Dostoevsky makes sense of everything. I really needed to read this essay right now, and I'm so glad that now is the time I have reached it in my philosophical reading. The entire essay rings very, very, very close to home. It might even ring at home if I wasn't one of those people he's talking about, the kind that can only build but can never live in their homes. I can hear the bell ringing in my house, but like everyone I cling to death and chaos and destruction because I am terrified that I will not have anything left to look for if I allow myself to be happy and live in my home.

If there is something remarkable I have discovered this year it is that in everyone I know that is struggling with things like self-injury and drugs and relationships and alcohol and all of that, they have done it to themselves. I have discovered that people sabotage themselves. I mentioned that I was doing that to myself a little while ago in that essay I wrote while I was at the lake. It's true. We like building, but in the end, we can't stand moving in.

I know that I could be happy if only I wasn't so afraid of happiness.

I won't settle with the henhouse. My life is about more than keeping out of the rain.