pensive to live in Petersburg. I know all
that better than all these sage and experienced counsellors and
monitors.... But I am remaining in Petersburg; I am not going away
from Petersburg! I am not going away because ... ech! Why, it is
absolutely no matter whether I am going away or not going away.

But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?

Answer: Of himself.

Well, so I will talk about myself.

II

I want now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not,
why I could not even become an insect. I tell you solemnly, that I
have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to
that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness--a
real thorough-going illness. For man's everyday needs, it would have
been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is,
half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated
man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal
ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional
town on the whole terrestrial globe. (There are intentional and
unintentional towns.) It would have been quite enough, for instance,
to have the consciousness by which all so-called direct persons and men
of action live. I bet you think I am writing all this from
affectation, to be witty at the expense of men of action; and what is
more, that from ill-bred affectation, I am clanking a sword like my
officer. But, gentlemen, whoever can pride himself on his diseases and
even swagger over them?

Though, after all, everyone does do that; people do pride themselves on
their diseases, and I do, may be, more than anyone. We will not
dispute it; my contention was absurd. But yet I am firmly persuaded
that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in
fact, is a disease. I stick to that. Let us leave that, too, for a
minute. Tell me this: why does it happen that at the very, yes, at the
very moments when I am most capable of feeling every refinement of all
that is "sublime and beautiful," as they used to say at one time, it
would, as though of design, happen to me not only to feel but to do
such ugly things, such that ... Well, in short, actions that all,
perhaps, commit; but which, as though purposely, occurred to me at the
very time when I was most conscious that they ought not to be
committed. The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was
"su