The case against reading
I finished reading notes from underground yesterday (or today?) and it was so simple that it broke my mind. Like, there is nothing to it. Literally nothing. But for some reason I was so engaged while reading it. When I think of writing something, I think about all the ways the story needs to be put up and structured and neatly tied up in the end, but no, it all seems very superfluous now. It always does, after reading Dostoevsky. Why is it that the greatest works are so simple, yet so hard to emulate? It all seems so obvious. But of course, I can’t write this “obvious” stuff on my own. Makes me wonder so many things. What would Dostoevsky be like if met him in real life? Everybody seems so similar these days. I want to meet a Dostoevsky. I want a Dostoevsky to speak to me and destroy me, just as the underground guy destroyed Liza.
And I have been reading books these days. I read one book, and then another, and then yet another book. I haven’t read this much in a long time, still it’s not enough. And these books have torn me apart, they have stretched my brain, squeezed it, sliced it, thrashed it, and in the end all I have is nothing. These books, I learn so much from them, yet it’s all one big merry go round. I want to read more books, and I want to write a lot more.
These days, whenever I feel an emotion, it seems so fleeting. The illusion of time has never been weaker. I can’t feel things. I feel like I’m experiencing life from out of my body. I feel like I’m eating but I can’t taste anything, and neither does my body need me to eat anything. It feels like I’m eating just because that’s what human beings do.
I went to the office today. And it was great. It honestly was amazing. I don’t get why people don’t want to go to the office. I don’t even care if I get to talk to anyone or not. I think we’re lucky. I think it’s great to be a wagecuck. We’re lucky people, really. We’re so entitled that we decide that this good life is not good enough and that we need to stop being wagecucks. But the reality is that this is the best life that there can be. There is nothing better than this. Although I still like not going to the office all the time. Sometimes is ok.
And what’s more important is that we wagecucks don’t know how to blow money. We need to learn how to blow money, not just collect it. You’re earning money, learn how to spend it. It’s weird, how difficult it is for people to be comfortable with spending money. There’re no guarantees in life, you gotta know how to use money. I’d rather be broke in a decade than have a large stash of money that I never spent. Of course, I only say that because I have confidence in my skills to be a wagecuck whenever I want.
Will I ever be able to write as well as Dostoevsky? No, of course not. That guy is a genius. I wish to be able to be 1% as good as him. I saw some of the things I had written a few years back when I was not in a good place. A lot of that stuff, even though immature, is extremely powerful. I really liked my own writing even though I saw it from effectively fresh eyes. I don’t think I’m ever going to put what I wrote out in the public. I wonder how it would be to read Dostoevsky’s works in Russian. I’m not gonna learn Russian, but yeah, I still wonder.
I wonder what book I should read next. All of these books shake my brain up so much that I feel like I need a little time before I can start another book. I need to do that sometimes with other creative works as well. When I consume something extremely powerful, I need to wait quite a while for the dust to settle down. I need to wait for the ideas to really start making sense and move out from the center of my brain towards the boundaries of my skull and to get absorbed at those boundaries. I don’t even know if I want to read Dostoevsky right now. That would be an overdose perhaps. I should probably read something shallow, or just take a break. I don’t want to OD on him.