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.
You are now in your seventies. Your mom already died and part of you still isn't ready to accept that ever happened. You met someone, you married again but your mom was too sick to attend your wedding. You regret not finding genuine love earlier.
Thirty years ago you had a drink, you don't really think that one drink changed much in your life.
Sorry for your loss(?).
You settled down and found a job you liked, or maybe didn't but pretended you liked for the sake of the person you married. You didn't have kids and it's pretty clear now you can't have kids.
Maybe you should've adopted.
You don't know.
Money isn't as much of a problem anymore.
You have a pension, you live happy and there are a few teeangers around the neighborhood that sometimes leave a few treats in your porch because of the one time you got them out of trouble when they broke the neighbor's windows.
They're probably making the choice to go to college by now, or at least are thinking about it. You feel a sort of resentment for this. You dont know why.
You still miss the days where you worried about missing your mom while moving to college. She's dead now and you only have a memory of her to look back at. You only look at the good things.
You're also getting sick now and you worry that before you know it, you'll die.
You feel lost.
You wonder if the laws of the universe are really what determine who you'll be in life, if your fate is written in stone or if you're a product of your circumstances. You feel lost, because neither answer is enough and neither answer gives you an ounce of belief that your choices matter. Because even if they do, you never made the choices in life that made you the happiest
You look outside your window and see the teenage girls and boys running around and making bets, carefree of the burden of choices. But they're making them. You remember something that your mom told you when you were 10, maybe 11.
She said, "Nobody wants to live like the Underground Man."
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