Fergus, Quondam Happy Face's Reviews > Notes from Underground

As I burrowed anxiously into Fyodor Dostoevsky’s underground rant when I was eighteen, I was suddenly mushrooming in stature far beyond my pay scale.

How do you explain it to your senior year preppie-ish friends that you’re suddenly beyond them? You’re like Alice in the rabbit hole. I had been a bullied suburban kid, and now I was being harried by absurd abstractions.

And justifying it - by labelling it smart - but sotto voce, so no one heard me.

All my life, you see, my thoughts and emotions had had free reign over my headspace, simply because I suddenly thought they corresponded with those of some amazing writers.

In one fell stroke my thought thought itself out into a complete simplicity: and by the same stroke I was left far behind by the crowd, a disgrace. Bullies who had harassed me, now high school gridiron heroes, told me I had to get my act in gear. Why didn’t I get the picture?

Small town kids only thrive in their own small minds. For them, what you see is what you get. But they’re right, in a sense, except they all wanted more, too.

They wanted a BIG slice of the Pie.

And I had another 50 years to live before I’d see that. In the meantime I’d be just like Auden’s ambitious kid who one day, for the first time, “saw his (enormous) shadow - and ran.”

And running from your shadow is in fact becoming a REAL Underground Man.

Once a real grownup sees you’re doing it, you’re Royally Snookered. And you’re really underground. As Hesse said, you’re now Beneath the Wheel.

So you pay. As all pay, who aim too high.

But you know what?

If you pay that price as fully consciously and in the same way as you once thought you saw great men’s thoughts echoing your own, you may in fact pay it as a Conscious Sacrifice to a Greater Being.

A Being of ground-zero, true ethical substance.

The only hope of a secure foundation for our life. And the only release from our self-imposed separation within the common currency of craving.

For ONLY when our hopes have all been turned to dust, do we see.

That doesn’t seem like such a Great Leap to make when you’re reduced to Ground Level - that’s the beautiful irony of it.

For to the big shots, faith is a weak crutch - while to little schmoes like you and me, it’s a clear path to peace.

As the faith of the Russian Master who wrote this novella was for him.

For the writing about the Underground Man was just a pretense...

An excuse for him to reach out to pass the only available candle to ALL of us under-grounders:

Who have spent too long in the dark not to reach out ourselves - for the first glimmer of light in our grim lives -

The Light of true Being.