Two to chew over, taste, and digest if you would like--
1.) In the first chapter the underground man states, "Of course, boredom leads to every possible kind of ingenuity. After all, it is out boredom that golden pins get stuck into people, but all this would not matter. What is bad (again this is me speaking) is that fora ll I know people may then find pleasure in golden pins." Why would people like being stabbed with golden pins? What is a modern day example of this, how do you relate to this idea?
2.) The narrator spends so much time talking about, "l'homme de la nature et de la vertite." Does nature breed truth? How does a man of nature understand the laws that produce truth? Is this a contradiction? How might the laws of nature also create the society in which our narrator loathes?
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I don't know if anyone esle has this problem but it takes me forever to post. Besides the fact, that I mentally cannot do the letter things, it doesn't remember my user name and then it says I don't have one and every time I have to recreate it. Does anyone have this problem?
think one possibility is the golden pins idea is similar to the toothache idea. That we all complain and complain about something out loud so much just to make other people suffer along with us. "Well, the pleasure lies in all this conscious shamefulness. ‘ I'm disturbing you' he seems to say. 'I'm lacerating your feeling and preventing everybody in the house from sleeping. Well, don't sleep, then; you ought to be feeling my toothache all the time." The idea that if we complain all the time others will suffer with us even if that doesn't cure our pain. I think our generation does this a ton. We seem to always be complaining about something or another and we take advantage of everything we are given in life and we complain so others can hear about the bad situation we are in and we can hopefully get the feeling that we aren’t alone.
Another interpretation of this quote could be that we get so bored and don't really do anything in our lives, that we reach this state of boredom where we will do anything to escape it. It isn't just with boredom either. There are so many situations where we get ourselves in and there's no way out. That's what teachers usually say about cheating. I think it was Mr. Sherbahn who said that as seniors are all so busy and we have college applications and teachers think that people we are seniors we can do large and large amounts of homework, that we get so overwhelmed and get ourselves into this hole and we can't find a way out. The only way we sometimes see a light to get out of this hole is to look online or talk to something to take care of that one assignment just to make our lives easier. It's unfortunate that we get ourselves into these situations where we have to do such horrible things to get us out. Apparently that can happen with boredom too.
I wanted to respond to the first thought and also to Sasha’s blog entry. I interpreted the quotes in a different way. Sasha, you brought up the toothache quotes and what I took from that excerpt was that we take pleasure in despair. “His groans have become something vicious and maliciously nasty, and they go on all day and all night. And yet he knows perfectly well that his groans won’t do the slightest good, he knows better than anybody else that he is harrowing and irritating himself and everybody else for nothing [….].” I believe that this passage relates to the idea that “boredom leads to every possible kind of ingenuity” in a sense that it is a contradiction. When I think of boredom, I think of being unproductive and idle and not a fostering of the mind. With the pleasure and despair that Dostoyevsky is experiencing in his toothache, it is oxymoronic that one would gain pleasure from their own discomfort.
Although the excerpt that Dostoyevsky talked about with the “golden pins” was a bit graphic, I wanted to take my own personal, positive spin off of it. I have a decent amount of space in my room and during those precious few moments of boredom, that I hardly ever get to experience, I like to dance in my room. You maybe thinking that I am nuts because I’m ALWAYS dancing or that it is just plain weird, but this is different than being in a dance studio. The boredom sparks movement in me. Whether I am in a restless boredom or lethargic boredom, my dancing adjusts. The “golden pins” are my inspiration which I gain from my surroundings, mood, and music. I am woken up from the monotony by pangs of desire to move and how to move. My body responds with each “golden pin” and eventually I am able to create cohesive dance in the four walls of my own room. There is no dance technique to labor and sweat over and no dance teacher to judge with a critical eye. Whether it is slow and flowing or sharp and angry movement, I react to what I am feeling in that moment and how the “golden pins” are moving my body.
Does anyone else cope with boredom in a way such as mine, whether it is writing, playing an instrument, or anything? Or am I just totally bizarre?!
I am going to respond on the second question…but yes sasha I have the same difficulty logging in. I write my stuff in Microsoft word and then take like an extra 20min after typing it to figure out how to log on.
Let me start with saying that I’m taking Humanities too and this class and that class intertwine so much its crazy.
Anyways…I think I agree with our narrator in the idea that nature breads truth. I don’t think there’s a way this can be false. Nature cant really lie to us a tree is a tree grass is grass. It is what it is. Maybe the world tree could be discombobulated like tree doesn’t really have to be that tall bush thing but its still there and it cant be man-made, so it must be made from this thing we call mother nature. I think a man of nature understands the laws that produce truth in the way that nature doesn’t lie because it really can’t. So when someone encounters truth from something outside of nature it doesn’t shock him or her because they haven’t experienced anything other then truth. This makes me completely think of the book we are reading in Humanities, Siddartha. He’s on his little mission to find out what the meaning of life is so he goes and joins the Sharmans and there he like sacrifices himself and stuff. But then he finds the ultimate Sharman and hears his preach and is like okay I’m going to abandon everything and just went off by myself. Which actually works out for him because he finds his own ultimate truth. But the point that we are at is where he has become re-consumed in material objects. I relate this story to Notes from the underground because I feel like where our narrator is where Siddartha started. In a society where he fits in but he makes himself his own outcast. Right now in the Siddartha book we are tying some pieces together and some are still dangling. I feel like that’s where we are at this point in the notes from the underground as well. I think this also ties with the discussion we had today. Is our narrator a man of action or a man of thought? I think that if he were merely a man of thought he would be able to fall under his own words. "l'homme de la nature et de la vertite." However, since he is both a man of action and man of truth he cannot tie himself solely to one or the other. However, I do not know for certain and this is one loose end that I think will be repaired as we continue reading.
Hi bloggers. This is to number 2.
Sasha:You're not alone! Those letter things trip me up too.
“l’homme de la nature et de lat vertite,” is a man of action who lives his life according to a set of standards and laws which have been set in place by society. These laws have gradually built up to form a wall, which sets the boundaries for how men should live and think. These men do not realize that there could be something beyond the wall so once men of action reach the wall they see their only option as to “give up in all sincerity.” (chapter 1, part 3) They are content to live within the wall’s border because they view the laws which have already put in place as unquestionable truth, so they don’t think to look to nature to find truth. They fail to realize that laws don’t breed truth, only nature does. They only look to what has been established, when they should look to the nature, where there are no limits.
On the other hand, men of thinking realize that there is another side of the wall. Unlike men of action, they see the wall as something which should be brought down by continually questioning the laws which most accept as truth. They refuse to accept the walls existence, yet they are often forced to live within the walls, for this how the rest of society functions. The narrator, who in class we decided was a man of thought, loathes the society, because it is limited by the wall, by formulas and laws. He recognizes that “reason is only reason and it satisfies only man’s intellectual facilities, while volition is a manifestation of the whole of life.” (chapter 1, part 8) He refuses to accept reason and law as the cure to all of society’s problems, and wants to seek beyond the wall and what has already been established.
There is a contadiction here..because the only way to find truths is to look to nature (because I agree that nature breeds truth), yet the narrator lives underground and hides from society. In order to understand society he must engage and be a part of it, but his thoughts prevents him from acting within the society, so he is just as limited as the man of action. He creates his own wall which separates his thoughts from his actions, while man of action live by a wall which has already been created by society.
I know some people criticize this book for being too rambling and for often digressing off onto too many tangents that it’s hard to consistently follow what Dostoyevsky’s point is. While I agree with this, I also kind of like the manner in which Dostoyevsky writes because I often find myself writing the same way. My mom introduced me to stream-of-consciousness writing sometime last year and said it’d be a good way to get everything in my head right out onto paper, and that’s certainly what Dostoyevsky’s narrator does.
As for the golden pin, I wholeheartedly agree that people would find enjoyment out of this. Pain is the universal language; it connects animals to humans, and it’s an expression of being alive. Imagine someone like Dostoyevsky’s narrator or the Invisible Man, someone isolated from the world and confined to the boundaries of their own psyche. People like this yearn to feel, and the feeling and expression of pain is something that verifies their existence. It’s ironic that pain is used as an expression of life, because pain is often something that precedes death. Then there’s another breed of self-mutilators who stick pins into themselves in order to better understand their inner turmoil. They can cut or burn themselves and pinpoint (no pun intended) the exact cause of the pain: “OK, I just cut myself, it hurts, this is what’s hurting me.” It’s not as easy to figure out one’s emotions. I think our narrator falls in the category of people who get caught up in thinking too much, which makes it even harder to figure out the actual problem, since he’s thinking and re-thinking every single thing. This type of physical pain is a release of the things they can’t quite figure out inside of them.
While these people inflict pain on themselves, there are people who seek to feel pain inflicted on them by others. I think the reasons behind masochism are very varied and not always the most understandable, but I have a few ideas. Just like pain verifies life, it’s also a connection between people. Dostoyevsky brought up the point about being called a “lazy man” and how, though it may not be the most desirable title, it’s still a title, and it means his existence is recognized as something. With pain it’s the same thing; to put the narrator in the place of one of Cleopatra’s slaves, if she were to stick him with golden pins, she would at least be doing something to him. His shrieks would make her appear alive, and make him known to her. This is why the scenario with the officer disturbed him so much, because to be merely moved out of the way like he was, it makes him no different than a chair or any other inanimate object that might have been in the officers way. If the officer would have caused him pain, he would have at least felt something.
I’m neither a masochist or a self-mutilator, but I think the evidence that connects our physical bodies with our emotions and moods is enough to prove that pain can have a deeper psychological meaning. Just like exercise produces mood-lifting endorphins, pain can produce a strange feeling of relief, control*, and desperate hope.
*Given that the person is inflicting the pain on themselves.
NUMBER 2
This is a rather philosophical question, and I'm afraid I'm going to get lost in it. But I will try to model the pattern of the Underground Man, and not hyper-analyze my thoughts but simply write as they come to me. So bear with me.
In Mr. Fletcher's sixties course this fall, we read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a collection of interrelated stories about the Vietnam War. In this book, O'Brien discusses the concept of truth quite a bit, and how a true story is not necessarily one that has happened, but one that evokes a visceral reaction in the reader that is akin to what the author experienced. He says, "Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth." This is a confusing contradiction, and it would probably make more sense in context with the rest of the story (which you should read if you haven't!!), but the general idea is that truth is based on perception and emotion, not incidents themselves. O'Brien was specifically talking about war stories in this case, but the idea can be applied to all stories and to life in general.
I guess what I'm driving at here is that before we judge whether or not nature breeds truth, we have to figure out what truth is. We have discussed how everyone sees the world from different vantages; I think it is fair to assume then that for each perspective, there is a different truth. Therefore, I think the only truth a person can be entirely conscious of is his or her own personal truth, the telescope through which that person views the world. While peoples' truths may overlap at times, ultimately we are the sole carriers of our own truth.
Thus I would argue that nature does not breed truth. Nature and the laws of the universe indicate the events that happen, but truth is how one perceives them. Dostoyevsky's "man of nature and truth," I believe is equivalent to his concept of a "man of action." He is impulsive, and his proceedings are often based more on gut feeling than on rationality. The Underground Man criticizes and praises this "man of action" (which he considers himself not to be, although as we discussed today in class it seems that he is at least in part). "L'homme de la nature et de la verite, with his innate stupidity," writes Dostoyevsky, "considers his revenge to be no more than justice, while [one of] heightened awareness denies that there is any justice about it." This is clearly a cynical remark, one that characterizes the man of nature and truth to be ruled by that which is irrational. Yet Dotoyevsky goes on later to praise this irrationality as a defining human characteristic: "the height of stupidity…preserve[s] what is dear and extremely important to us, that is our personality and our individuality."
In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien talks about a particular war story (the details are unnecessary) that he agonizes over because no matter how he tells it, he cannot evoke the reaction he wants from his audience. After a frustrating encounter with a woman who liked the story but didn't understand the truth, he internally remarks, "She wasn't listening... But you can't say that. All you can do is tell it one more time, patient, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth... You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it."
It’s like what Camus says of the writer's duty in his Nobel Acceptance Speech: "Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as is it elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road." Why does O'Brien tell his stories if no one will ever understand the truth? Why did Camus continue to march toward truth knowing even as he was doing so that he would fail? Because this illogical perseverance is what makes them human! As the Underground Man says, "It is precisely [man's] most fantastic daydreams, his vulgarest foolishness, that he wants to cling to, just so he can assert (as if it were absolutely essential) that people are still people and not piano keys." It is the journey that matters. "Man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself," says the Underground Man. He goes on to suggest that the "uninterrupted process of attainment," which he equates to living, is perhaps the sole goal of human kind.
I applaud those of who you have made it though this rambling post. To conclude, last week Mr. Kasprzak posed the question to us that appears to be the theme of the course, if not English class in general: Why do we write? O'Brien, Camus, Dostoyevsky, I, and millions of other writers I think would agree: We write because the act of telling our truths is what makes us human.
P.S. - Hannah, I totally understand what you wrote about dancing. I do that sometimes too, or I'll just sing and doodle around on my guitar for awhile.
Sasha- I had the same problem with logging in. First you need to go the email you gave google blogger and verify the account. And then one other problem that you might be having (one that I JUST figured out) is that when it says username I think you put your email, not the "display name." At least I think thats what I did...Anyway, here's another take on the golden pin idea.
Boredom could easily be considered one of the most dangerous of sensations. While anger is directed at someone or something and sorrow is some sort of a direct result, boredom has no roots. It can’t be blamed on anything and it can’t be cured with a quick fix. If, while grappling for something to hold onto, boredom seizes you, you are left in a very vulnerable condition. In many cases, prospects that usually seem bleak or dangerous to you seem inviting if you can find nothing else with which to pass your time, for a pain or a hurt may actually feel better than feeling nothing at all. This is when we start sticking ourselves with golden pins. Our golden pins are the knives at a plastic surgeon’s tableside. They are the bongs and the syringes in the hands of junkies who can’t let go. They are the one-night stands and the recurring affairs and hollow attempts at satisfaction of one of us spinning out of control. Our golden pins are every pain we inflict in order to mask the larger, more crushing pain of realizing we aren’t feeling anything in the first place.
I dare anyone reading this to claim with honesty that this doesn’t apply to them. Especially considering that we’re a group of high school students, I would venture to guess that an overwhelming majority of us have done things we would rather not admit to because we were bored. I won’t deny that my own past is scarred. However, I own up to the skeletons in my closet because, sometimes, I honestly believe that I would rather experience pain than boredom myself. Above all else, I fear regrets, and I am willing to risk receiving pain in order to avoid wasting time. I have come to term with my own mistakes because I recognize that they haven’t become repetitive or habitual.
The trouble arises when we start to “find pleasure in golden pins.” Swapping boredom for a hollow satisfaction is one false step, but when we sacrifice opportunities for genuine happiness for these golden pins of syringes and one-night stands, we have begun to lose ourselves. If the torture of a golden pin begins to stifle or consume us, if a curiosity becomes a habit becomes a lifestyle, we will long for the days when our most pressing concern was having nothing else to do.
Alright, i'm doing question #1 and going along with the idea that thinking men just take things for granted, that, though they do realize they're unsatisfied or unhappy, don't do anything about it. (whereas men of action know something is wrong, feel trapped and caged in their unhappiness, and slam against the walls for freedom)...
So anyway, I'm thinking that those golden pins are just opportunities for the thinkers to become acters (not actors, but men of action). It's just a prick, tiny tingle of pain, that snaps those thinkers back to reality...out of their fake world of thoughts and reminding them to take action I suppose. Just shock of truth, an opportunity to hop over that wall and to take action. An example of a golden pin in the book would be that whole incident with the cop or guard. I think it reminded him of how unsatisfied he was with his invisibility and how unhappy with his underground-ness... I think this encouraged him to take action. It was one of those golden pins.
I think events like these happen every day. Whether its something someone says, what they do to you, how they look at you. I think every time it happens you feel uneasy or your heart skips a beat and you become angry or depressed. I think that's a golden pin. I think its regret that you haven't taken any action, but i think its also a new opportunity to change.
I don't think he necessarily said people like this. I definitely don't think all do. Personally, I would think that for some people the prick could just get annoying. For some people, I don't think it would shock them into action, but throw them deeper into depression.
I'm not looking forward to ending this post.... those letters look particularly hard to copy today (and this is the third time my post failed)... yet here I am thinking about it, maybe its time to take some action? ;p
Some may find pleasure in being stabbed with golden pins because it takes them to one of their most basic level of being. You don’t even have to have one intelligent thought going through your mind to feel pain. When you physically feel pain you don’t question why you feel pain, because it’s the body’s natural reaction. As a result, there’s no longer a human need to delve deeper into the basic feeling of pain. You may think about why you react to pain in certain ways, but you just accept that you feel pain because you do, there’s no way to get around that. People may also like being stabbed with golden pins because it’s something that relates their mind to their body. No one can experience pain without having some thought about it, even if it’s just something like I like the pain or I don’t, but there’s always something to be thought about it as a reaction.
In chapter one the narrator states, “Suffering—after all, that is the sole cause of consciousness.” This quote reminded me of something from Humanities, and I agree with Sarah in that some things from both of these classes are so related it’s crazy. But anyways, in Humanities we learned about Buddha’s Four Noble Truths about life, and one was, “Life is suffering.” This certainly relates to anyone taking pleasure in this “suffering”, well physical suffering, from being stabbed by golden pins. Feeling physical pain, like what my first quote said, is a sign that you are alive because like I said it is a basic level of being, something that automatically comes with being alive. Just like in any case, one can take pleasure in being completely conscious about their current state, even if that is feeling pain.
Being stabbed with golden pins can also be pleasurable because it has the ability to break down this “wall” separating people of thought from people of action. These stabbings can turn a person of thought in to a person of action, because no longer is their source of anguish something manifesting within, it is on the outside caused by an action, and they no longer have to wonder about the thought of it, they can get straight to the action itself which is easier to digest.
The pleasure in being stabbed with golden pins can relate to the modern day example of psychological reasoning behind things like cutting or other self harm. If you use “golden pins”, whatever that may be, to hurt yourself, then you know where this pain is coming from. That is often pleasurable to people because they know that something happening to them is concrete and they can point directly to the source of whatever emotion they are feeling. This relates to my previous section about turning people of thought in to people of action.
Boredom however, is not something you can often find a direct source of. I agree that boredom does lead to ingenuity because if your mind was not bored of its current state, and craving something else, then how would you ever find a reason to think about anything or do anything? We don’t often directly associate our reason for thought with boredom because it’s not the traditional extreme like “I have nothing to do my life is one bane existence” kind of boredom, but if there wasn’t some sort of tedium for one to escape from then there would be no cause for one to have any new thoughts in their lifetime. It’s subconscious that we just think about something else, but really it’s a result of boredom at its simplest form.
Boredom not only leads to all thought, but action as well. If you were completely, wholeheartedly content in your physical state of being then you would also never do anything different, ever. It doesn’t mean you are unhappy with whatever you are doing, because boredom doesn’t equate to unhappiness, there is just a need for something else. This is true for anyone; so even if they aren’t thinking about it much, their bodies are still bored in their current state of being, so that person does some new type of action, whatever it may be.
I’m going to go ahead and simply sum up all I said about boredom and make the statement that boredom is the base for all the thoughts of people of thought and all the actions of people of action, because really thinking about it, I truly believe it.
I’m having trouble answering the last part of this question, about how I relate to this. I feel like I’m being completely hypocritical with my statements because I can’t figure out how I relate to this idea of the “golden pins”, even though I probably do but can’t realize it. I just described all of these things about the human condition that I can’t even include myself in, because right now I can only think literally and how I don’t take any gratification out of physical pain, so I feel really hypocritical. I guess all I can say is that I don’t know how I relate to it, and I should find that out.
ok, I posted this originally right after hannah, but for some reason it is gone. I think I logged in wrong. so I am re-posting it.
Okay, so this time I'm going for the first question. I agree a lot with what sasha said… but in my own opinion about what he was writing, I think he was saying that people also like to dish out pain…
But anyway here goes.
So why would someone want to be stabbed with pins? Well, like sasha said, people love to find things to complain about. But it is also because without pain, life would be boring. As Dostoyevsky says, if the world lived in peace and then one day some guy came along and said "come on, gentlemen, why shouldn't we get rid of all this calm reasonableness with one kick, just so as to send all these logarithms to the devil and be able to live our own lives at our own sweet will?" (33)
With no pain, men would soon become bored with peace. Peace, although nice, is probably boring. With nothing painful to work against, life would be "perfect" but imperfect because of that great good that Dostoyevsky talks about. "One's own free and unfettered volition, one's own caprice, however wild, one's own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness -- that is the one best and greatest good," (34).
Without this ability to have free will, man would get bored. There would be nothing to strive for, to complain about, no nasty rumors, no one to hate, and no balance. As for modern examples, I feel that there are a couple I can easily draw upon. In "The Matrix", the machines said that before they had made the matrix, they made a perfect virtual world for the humans to live in, but the humans couldn't stand it and rejected that dream world. I definitely think that this relates.
Now for examples of real people… forgive me, but I'm going to talk about cutters. People who cut themselves take pleasure from the pain that they inflict. It gives them a reason to cry, or sometimes a reason to hurt when they feel nothing… perhaps pain is a feeling preferable to nothingness? With peace, there could be no love either… because love causes pain too. It is better to love and then be heart broken, than to never have loved at all… so therefore pain is part of a balance and a sacrifice… if the gold pins are love, perhaps it is better to have been pricked by them and feel the pain than feel nothing.
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