I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattract-ive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for cer-tain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Be-sides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be su-perstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot ‘pay out’ the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well—let it get worse!I have been going on like that for a long time—twenty years. Now I am forty. I used to be in the government ser-vice, but am no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it off on purpose!) When petitioners used to come for information to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and felt intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making any-body unhappy. I almost did succeed. For the most part they were all timid people—of course, they were petitioners. But of the uppish ones there was one officer in particular I could not endure. He simply would not be humble, and clanked his sword in a disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for eighteen months over that sword. At last I got the better of him. He left off clanking it. That happened in my youth, though. But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite? Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly conscious with shame that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should be appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I should grind my teeth at myself after-wards and lie awake at night with shame for months after. That was my way.I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful of-ficial. I was lying from spite. I was simply amusing myself with the petitioners and with the officer, and in reality I never could become spiteful. I was conscious every moment in myself of many, very many elements absolutely opposite to that. I felt them positively swarming in me, these oppositeelements. I knew that they had been swarming in me all my life and craving some outlet from me, but I would not let them, would not let them, purposely would not let them come out. They tormented me till I was ashamed: they drove me to convulsions and—sickened me, at last, how they sickened me! Now, are not you fancying, gentlemen, that I am expressing remorse for something now, that I am asking your forgiveness for something? I am sure you are fancying that ... However, I assure you I do not care if you are.
And by some miracle, this choice that you made to click next, is completely uncorrelated to the fact that you have now been born.
Congratulations(?).
Sorry for your loss(?).
Because of this, you now have a birthday, an arbitrary date dedicated to you as a being.
You also have a name.
And because of this.
Again, you don't have aspirations.
You were just born and the world looks like weird splotches of color. You don't like this. You want to be back where you were before, where you remember the warmth of a placenta.
You're now 3 years old, you've learned enough words to say what you need, but it upsets you that sometimes what you say doesn't result in getting what you want. You're learning cause and effect and how to make your own choices.
You don't like this.
Maybe.
There's another child that lives in your home. Your "mom" says it is your "sister". You don't completely know what that means.