"I can understand a fellow wanting to shoot himself, I have thought of it myself sometimes, and then always some new idea occurred to me: if one were to commit some crime, I mean, something shameful, that is something really disgraceful, something very mean and - ridiculous, so that people would remember it for a thousand years and remember it with disgust for a thousand years, and suddenly the thought came : One blow in the temple and there would be nothing more. What would I care for people then or that they would remember it with disgust for a thousand years? Isn't that so?
Let us suppose that you had lived on the moon, Let us suppose that you committed all those ridiculous and abominable crimes there. You know from here that they will laugh at you there and think of your name with disgust for a thousand years, for ever, for as long as the moon lasts. But now you are here and you are looking at the moon from here: what do you care what you have done there and that people there will think with disgust of you for a thousand years? It is true, isn't it?"
from The Devils, Dostoyevsky
3 comments:
Did I ?
the quirks of blogging! this is not the ecstacy i want..............
hi kubla :-)
how do you feel about stavrogin? I was in love with him when I read the novel, I must have been 15 by that time.
and what kind of ecstasy you could still possibly want, you who have fed on honey-dew and drunk the milk of paradise? :-)
you know, I don't like coleridge and I think he has got no talent at all, but this poem, and maybe not all of it, but this last part is so magnificent, I have to wonder how he did it. and I believe him when he says he just wrote down what he received, in a kind of trance...
opium dream i think it was... maybe you should take up on the offer of those ecstacy pills...haha
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