prompt:
Chapter: It was some time, however, before I consented to recognise that truth.
Waking up in the morning after some hours of heavy, leaden sleep, and
immediately realising all that had happened on the previous day, I was
positively amazed at my last night's SENTIMENTALITY with Liza, at all
those "outcries of horror and pity."  "To think of having such an
attack of womanish hysteria, pah!" I concluded.  And what did I thrust
my address upon her for?  What if she comes?  Let her come, though; it
doesn't matter....  But OBVIOUSLY, that was not now the chief and the
most important matter: I had to make haste and at all costs save my
reputation in the eyes of Zverkov and Simonov as quickly as possible;
that was the chief business.  And I was so taken up that morning that I
actually forgot all about Liza.

First of all I had at once to repay what I had borrowed the day before
from Simonov.  I resolved on a desperate measure: to borrow fifteen
roubles straight off from Anton Antonitch.  As luck would have it he
was in the best of humours that morning, and gave it to me at once, on
the first asking.  I was so delighted at this that, as I signed the IOU
with a swaggering air, I told him casually that the night before "I had
been keeping it up with some friends at the Hotel de Paris; we were
giving a farewell party to a comrade, in fact, I might say a friend of
my childhood, and you know--a desperate rake, fearfully spoilt--of
course, he belongs to a good family, and has considerable means, a
brilliant career; he is witty, charming, a regular Lovelace, you
understand; we drank an extra 'half-dozen' and ..."

And it went off all right; all this was uttered very easily,
unconstrainedly and complacently.

On reaching home I promptly wrote to Simonov.

To this hour I am lost in admiration when I recall the truly
gentlemanly, good-humoured, candid tone of my letter.  With tact and
good-breeding, and, above all, entirely without superfluous words, I
blamed myself for all that had happened.  I defended myself, "if I
really may be allowed to defend myself," by alleging that being utterly
unaccustomed to wine, I had been intoxicated with the first glass,
which I said, I had drunk before they arrived, while I was waiting for
them at the Hotel de Paris between five and six o'clock.  I begged
Simonov's pardon especially; I asked him to convey my explanations to
all the others, especially to Zverkov, whom "I seemed to remember as
though in a dream" I had insulted.  I added that I would have called
upon all of them myself, but my head ached, and besides I had not the
face to.  I was particularly pleased with a certain lightness, almost
carelessness (strictly within the bounds of politeness, however), which
was apparent in my style, and better than any possible arguments, gave
them at once to understand that I took rather an independent view of
"all that unpleasantness last night"; that I was by no means so utterly
crushed as you, my friends, probably imagine; but on the contrary,
looked upon it as a gentleman serenely respecting himself should look
upon it.  "On a young hero's past no censure is cast!"

"There is actually an aristocratic playfulness about it!" I thought
admiringly, as I read over the letter.  "And it's all because I am an
intellectual and cultivated man!  Another man in my place would not
have known how to extricate himself, but here I have got out of it and
am as jolly as ever again, and all because I am 'a cultivated and
educated man of our day.' And, indeed, perhaps, everything was due to
the wine yesterday.  H'm!" ...  No, it was not the wine.  I did not
drink anything at all between five and six when I was waiting for them.
I had lied to Simonov; I had lied shamelessly; and indeed I wasn't
ashamed now.... Hang it all though, the great thing was that I was rid
of it.

I put six roubles in the letter, sealed it up, and asked Apollon to
take it to Simonov.  When he learned that there was money in the
letter, Apollon became more respectful and agreed to take it.  Towards
evening I went out for a walk.  My head was still aching and giddy
after yesterday.  But as evening came on and the twilight grew denser,
my impressions and, following them, my thoughts, grew more and more
different and confused. Something was not dead within me, in the depths
of my heart and conscience it would not die, and it showed itself in
acute depression.  For the most part I jostled my way through the most
crowded business streets, along Myeshtchansky Street, along Sadovy
Street and in Yusupov Garden. I always liked particularly sauntering
along these streets in the dusk, just when there were crowds of working
people of all sorts going home from their daily work, with faces
looking cross with anxiety.  What I liked was just that cheap bustle,
that bare prose.  On this occasion the jostling of the streets
irritated me more than ever, I could not make out what was wrong with
me, I could not find the clue, something seemed rising up continually
in my soul, painfully, and refusing to be appeased.  I returned home
completely upset, it was just as though some crime were lying on my
conscience.

The thought that Liza was coming worried me continually.  It seemed
queer to me that of all my recollections of yesterday this tormented
me, as it were, especially, as it were, quite separately.  Everything
else I had quite succeeded in forgetting by the evening; I dismissed it
all and was still perfectly satisfied with my letter to Simonov.  But
on this point I was not satisfied at all.  It was as though I were
worried only by Liza.  "What if she comes," I thought incessantly,
"well, it doesn't matter, let her come! H'm! it's horrid that she
should see, for instance, how I live.  Yesterday I seemed such a hero
to her, while now, h'm!  It's horrid, though, that I have let myself go
so, the room looks like a beggar's.  And I brought myself to go out to
dinner in such a suit!  And my American leather sofa with the stuffing
sticking out.  And my dressing-gown, which will not cover me, such
tatters, and she will see all this and she will see Apollon.  That
beast is certain to insult her.  He will fasten upon her in order to be
rude to me. And I, of course, shall be panic-stricken as usual, I shall
begin bowing and scraping before her and pulling my dressing-gown round
me, I shall begin smiling, telling lies.  Oh, the beastliness!  And it
isn't the beastliness of it that matters most!  There is something more
important, more loathsome, viler!  Yes, viler!  And to put on that
dishonest lying mask again! ..."

When I reached that thought I fired up all at once.

"Why dishonest?  How dishonest?  I was speaking sincerely last night.
I remember there was real feeling in me, too.  What I wanted was to
excite an honourable feeling in her....  Her crying was a good thing,
it will have a good effect."

Yet I could not feel at ease.  All that evening, even when I had come
back home, even after nine o'clock, when I calculated that Liza could
not possibly come, still she haunted me, and what was worse, she came
back to my mind always in the same position.  One moment out of all
that had happened last night stood vividly before my imagination; the
moment when I struck a match and saw her pale, distorted face, with its
look of torture.  And what a pitiful, what an unnatural, what a
distorted smile she had at that moment!  But I did not know then, that
fifteen years later I should still in my imagination see Liza, always
with the pitiful, distorted, inappropriate smile which was on her face
at that minute.

Next day I was ready again to look upon it all as nonsense, due to
over-excited nerves, and, above all, as EXAGGERATED.  I was always
conscious of that weak point of mine, and sometimes very much afraid of
it.  "I exaggerate everything, that is where I go wrong," I repeated to
myself every hour.  But, however, "Liza will very likely come all the
same," was the refrain with which all my reflections ended.  I was so
uneasy that I sometimes flew into a fury: "She'll come, she is certain
to come!" I cried, running about the room, "if not today, she will come
tomorrow; she'll find me out!  The damnable romanticism of these pure
hearts!  Oh, the vileness--oh, the silliness--oh, the stupidity of
these 'wretched sentimental souls!' Why, how fail to understand?  How
could one fail to understand? ..."

But at this point I stopped short, and in great confusion, indeed.

And how few, how few words, I thought, in passing, were needed; how
little of the idyllic (and affectedly, bookishly, artificially idyllic
too) had sufficed to turn a whole human life at once according to my
will.  That's virginity, to be sure!  Freshness of soil!

At times a thought occurred to me, to go to her, "to tell her all," and
beg her not to come to me.  But this thought stirred such wrath in me
that I believed I should have crushed that "damned" Liza if she had
chanced to be near me at the time.  I should have insulted her, have
spat at her, have turned her out, have struck her!

One day passed, however, another and another; she did not come and I
began to grow calmer.  I felt particularly bold and cheerful after nine
o'clock, I even sometimes began dreaming, and rather sweetly: I, for
instance, became the salvation of Liza, simply through her coming to me
and my talking to her.... I develop her, educate her.  Finally, I
notice that she loves me, loves me passionately.  I pretend not to
understand (I don't know, however, why I pretend, just for effect,
perhaps).  At last all confusion, transfigured, trembling and sobbing,
she flings herself at my feet and says that I am her saviour, and that
she loves me better than anything in the world.  I am amazed, but....
"Liza," I say, "can you imagine that I have not noticed your love?  I
saw it all, I divined it, but I did not dare to approach you first,
because I had an influence over you and was afraid that you would force
yourself, from gratitude, to respond to my love, would try to rouse in
your heart a feeling which was perhaps absent, and I did not wish that
... because it would be tyranny ... it would be indelicate (in short, I
launch off at that point into European, inexplicably lofty subtleties a
la George Sand), but now, now you are mine, you are my creation, you
are pure, you are good, you are my noble wife.

     'Into my house come bold and free,
     Its rightful mistress there to be'."

Then we begin living together, go abroad and so on, and so on.  In
fact, in the end it seemed vulgar to me myself, and I began putting out
my tongue at myself.

Besides, they won't let her out, "the hussy!" I thought.  They don't
let them go out very readily, especially in the evening (for some
reason I fancied she would come in the evening, and at seven o'clock
precisely). Though she did say she was not altogether a slave there
yet, and had certain rights; so, h'm!  Damn it all, she will come, she
is sure to come!

It was a good thing, in fact, that Apollon distracted my attention at
that time by his rudeness.  He drove me beyond all patience!  He was
the bane of my life, the curse laid upon me by Providence.  We had been
squabbling continually for years, and I hated him.  My God, how I hated
him! I believe I had never hated anyone in my life as I hated him,
especially at some moments.  He was an elderly, dignified man, who
worked part of his time as a tailor.  But for some unknown reason he
despised me beyond all measure, and looked down upon me insufferably.
Though, indeed, he looked down upon everyone.  Simply to glance at that
flaxen, smoothly brushed head, at the tuft of hair he combed up on his
forehead and oiled with sunflower oil, at that dignified mouth,
compressed into the shape of the letter V, made one feel one was
confronting a man who never doubted of himself.  He was a pedant, to
the most extreme point, the greatest pedant I had met on earth, and
with that had a vanity only befitting Alexander of Macedon.  He was in
love with every button on his coat, every nail on his
fingers--absolutely in love with them, and he looked it! In his
behaviour to me he was a perfect tyrant, he spoke very little to me,
and if he chanced to glance at me he gave me a firm, majestically
self-confident and invariably ironical look that drove me sometimes to
fury. He did his work with the air of doing me the greatest favour,
though he did scarcely anything for me, and did not, indeed, consider
himself bound to do anything.  There could be no doubt that he looked
upon me as the greatest fool on earth, and that "he did not get rid of
me" was simply that he could get wages from me every month.  He
consented to do nothing for me for seven roubles a month.  Many sins
should be forgiven me for what I suffered from him.  My hatred reached
such a point that sometimes his very step almost threw me into
convulsions.  What I loathed particularly was his lisp.  His tongue
must have been a little too long or something of that sort, for he
continually lisped, and seemed to be very proud of it, imagining that
it greatly added to his dignity.  He spoke in a slow, measured tone,
with his hands behind his back and his eyes fixed on the ground.  He
maddened me particularly when he read aloud the psalms to himself
behind his partition.  Many a battle I waged over that reading!  But he
was awfully fond of reading aloud in the evenings, in a slow, even,
sing-song voice, as though over the dead.  It is interesting that that
is how he has ended: he hires himself out to read the psalms over the
dead, and at the same time he kills rats and makes blacking.  But at
that time I could not get rid of him, it was as though he were
chemically combined with my existence.  Besides, nothing would have
induced him to consent to leave me. I could not live in furnished
lodgings: my lodging was my private solitude, my shell, my cave, in
which I concealed myself from all mankind, and Apollon seemed to me,
for some reason, an integral part of that flat, and for seven years I
could not turn him away.

To be two or three days behind with his wages, for instance, was
impossible.  He would have made such a fuss, I should not have known
where to hide my head.  But I was so exasperated with everyone during
those days, that I made up my mind for some reason and with some object
to PUNISH Apollon and not to pay him for a fortnight the wages that
were owing him.  I had for a long time--for the last two years--been
intending to do this, simply in order to teach him not to give himself
airs with me, and to show him that if I liked I could withhold his
wages.  I purposed to say nothing to him about it, and was purposely
silent indeed, in order to score off his pride and force him to be the
first to speak of his wages.  Then I would take the seven roubles out
of a drawer, show him I have the money put aside on purpose, but that I
won't, I won't, I simply won't pay him his wages, I won't just because
that is "what I wish," because "I am master, and it is for me to
decide," because he has been disrespectful, because he has been rude;
but if he were to ask respectfully I might be softened and give it to
him, otherwise he might wait another fortnight, another three weeks, a
whole month....

But angry as I was, yet he got the better of me.  I could not hold out
for four days.  He began as he always did begin in such cases, for
there had been such cases already, there had been attempts (and it may
be observed I knew all this beforehand, I knew his nasty tactics by
heart).  He would begin by fixing upon me an exceedingly severe stare,
keeping it up for several minutes at a time, particularly on meeting me
or seeing me out of the house.  If I held out and pretended not to
notice these stares, he would, still in silence, proceed to further
tortures.  All at once, A PROPOS of nothing, he would walk softly and
smoothly into my room, when I was pacing up and down or reading, stand
at the door, one hand behind his back and one foot behind the other,
and fix upon me a stare more than severe, utterly contemptuous.  If I
suddenly asked him what he wanted, he would make me no answer, but
continue staring at me persistently for some seconds, then, with a
peculiar compression of his lips and a most significant air,
deliberately turn round and deliberately go back to his room.  Two
hours later he would come out again and again present himself before me
in the same way.  It had happened that in my fury I did not even ask
him what he wanted, but simply raised my head sharply and imperiously
and began staring back at him.  So we stared at one another for two
minutes; at last he turned with deliberation and dignity and went back
again for two hours.

If I were still not brought to reason by all this, but persisted in my
revolt, he would suddenly begin sighing while he looked at me, long,
deep sighs as though measuring by them the depths of my moral
degradation, and, of course, it ended at last by his triumphing
completely: I raged and shouted, but still was forced to do what he
wanted.

This time the usual staring manoeuvres had scarcely begun when I lost
my temper and flew at him in a fury.  I was irritated beyond endurance
apart from him.

"Stay," I cried, in a frenzy, as he was slowly and silently turning,
with one hand behind his back, to go to his room.  "Stay!  Come back,
come back, I tell you!" and I must have bawled so unnaturally, that he
turned round and even looked at me with some wonder.  However, he
persisted in saying nothing, and that infuriated me.

"How dare you come and look at me like that without being sent for?
Answer!"

After looking at me calmly for half a minute, he began turning round
again.

"Stay!" I roared, running up to him, "don't stir!  There.  Answer, now:
what did you come in to look at?"

"If you have any order to give me it's my duty to carry it out," he
answered, after another silent pause, with a slow, measured lisp,
raising his eyebrows and calmly twisting his head from one side to
another, all this with exasperating composure.

"That's not what I am asking you about, you torturer!" I shouted,
turning crimson with anger.  "I'll tell you why you came here myself:
you see, I don't give you your wages, you are so proud you don't want
to bow down and ask for it, and so you come to punish me with your
stupid stares, to worry me and you have no sus-pic-ion how stupid it
is--stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid! ..."

He would have turned round again without a word, but I seized him.

"Listen," I shouted to him.  "Here's the money, do you see, here it
is," (I took it out of the table drawer); "here's the seven roubles
complete, but you are not going to have it, you ... are ... not ...
going ... to ... have it until you come respectfully with bowed head to
beg my pardon. Do you hear?"

"That cannot be," he answered, with the most unnatural self-confidence.

"It shall be so," I said, "I give you my word of honour, it shall be!"

"And there's nothing for me to beg your pardon for," he went on, as
though he had not noticed my exclamations at all.  "Why, besides, you
called me a 'torturer,' for which I can summon you at the
police-station at any time for insulting behaviour."

"Go, summon me," I roared, "go at once, this very minute, this very
second!  You are a torturer all the same!  a torturer!"

But he merely looked at me, then turned, and regardless of my loud
calls to him, he walked to his room with an even step and without
looking round.

"If it had not been for Liza nothing of this would have happened," I
decided inwardly.  Then, after waiting a minute, I went myself behind
his screen with a dignified and solemn air, though my heart was beating
slowly and violently.

"Apollon," I said quietly and emphatically, though I was breathless,
"go at once without a minute's delay and fetch the police-officer."

He had meanwhile settled himself at his table, put on his spectacles
and taken up some sewing.  But, hearing my order, he burst into a
guffaw.

"At once, go this minute!  Go on, or else you can't imagine what will
happen."

"You are certainly out of your mind," he observed, without even raising
his head, lisping as deliberately as ever and threading his needle.
"Whoever heard of a man sending for the police against himself?  And as
for being frightened--you are upsetting yourself about nothing, for
nothing will come of it."

"Go!" I shrieked, clutching him by the shoulder.  I felt I should
strike him in a minute.

But I did not notice the door from the passage softly and slowly open
at that instant and a figure come in, stop short, and begin staring at
us in perplexity I glanced, nearly swooned with shame, and rushed back
to my room.  There, clutching at my hair with both hands, I leaned my
head against the wall and stood motionless in that position.

Two minutes later I heard Apollon's deliberate footsteps.  "There is
some woman asking for you," he said, looking at me with peculiar
severity.  Then he stood aside and let in Liza.  He would not go away,
but stared at us sarcastically.

"Go away, go away," I commanded in desperation.  At that moment my
clock began whirring and wheezing and struck seven.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Waking the next morning, the UM is surprised at himself for expressing himself to Liza the way he did. He pays Simonov what he had borrowed from him the previous night, and includes in the repayment a letter of apology for his rude behavior. After taking care of this, he lapses back into thoughts of Liza. The UM is genuinely tormented by the idea that she might indeed come to see him, embarrassed by his poverty and indecency. He does, however, still like to imagine himself as her savior, pretending that she loves him and owes everything to him. Lastly, the UM describes his hatred for Apollon, his old servant to whom he owes wages. He can't stand it when Apollon stares at him out of spite, but more importantly, he can't stand the fact that Apollon won't yield to him, or let himself be dominated


prompt:
Chapter: "Into my house come bold and free,
     Its rightful mistress there to be."

I stood before her crushed, crestfallen, revoltingly confused, and I
believe I smiled as I did my utmost to wrap myself in the skirts of my
ragged wadded dressing-gown--exactly as I had imagined the scene not
long before in a fit of depression.  After standing over us for a
couple of minutes Apollon went away, but that did not make me more at
ease.  What made it worse was that she, too, was overwhelmed with
confusion, more so, in fact, than I should have expected.  At the sight
of me, of course.

"Sit down," I said mechanically, moving a chair up to the table, and I
sat down on the sofa.  She obediently sat down at once and gazed at me
open-eyed, evidently expecting something from me at once.  This naivete
of expectation drove me to fury, but I restrained myself.

She ought to have tried not to notice, as though everything had been as
usual, while instead of that, she ... and I dimly felt that I should
make her pay dearly for ALL THIS.

"You have found me in a strange position, Liza," I began, stammering
and knowing that this was the wrong way to begin.  "No, no, don't
imagine anything," I cried, seeing that she had suddenly flushed.  "I
am not ashamed of my poverty....  On the contrary, I look with pride
on my poverty.  I am poor but honourable....  One can be poor and
honourable," I muttered.  "However ... would you like tea?...."

"No," she was beginning.

"Wait a minute."

I leapt up and ran to Apollon.  I had to get out of the room somehow.

"Apollon," I whispered in feverish haste, flinging down before him the
seven roubles which had remained all the time in my clenched fist,
"here are your wages, you see I give them to you; but for that you must
come to my rescue: bring me tea and a dozen rusks from the restaurant.
If you won't go, you'll make me a miserable man!  You don't know what
this woman is.... This is--everything!  You may be imagining
something.... But you don't know what that woman is! ..."

Apollon, who had already sat down to his work and put on his spectacles
again, at first glanced askance at the money without speaking or
putting down his needle; then, without paying the slightest attention
to me or making any answer, he went on busying himself with his needle,
which he had not yet threaded.  I waited before him for three minutes
with my arms crossed A LA NAPOLEON.  My temples were moist with sweat.
I was pale, I felt it.  But, thank God, he must have been moved to
pity, looking at me.  Having threaded his needle he deliberately got up
from his seat, deliberately moved back his chair, deliberately took off
his spectacles, deliberately counted the money, and finally asking me
over his shoulder: "Shall I get a whole portion?" deliberately walked
out of the room.  As I was going back to Liza, the thought occurred to
me on the way: shouldn't I run away just as I was in my dressing-gown,
no matter where, and then let happen what would?

I sat down again.  She looked at me uneasily.  For some minutes we were
silent.

"I will kill him," I shouted suddenly, striking the table with my fist
so that the ink spurted out of the inkstand.

"What are you saying!" she cried, starting.

"I will kill him!  kill him!" I shrieked, suddenly striking the table
in absolute frenzy, and at the same time fully understanding how stupid
it was to be in such a frenzy.  "You don't know, Liza, what that
torturer is to me. He is my torturer....  He has gone now to fetch
some rusks; he ..."

And suddenly I burst into tears.  It was an hysterical attack.  How
ashamed I felt in the midst of my sobs; but still I could not restrain
them.

She was frightened.

"What is the matter?  What is wrong?" she cried, fussing about me.

"Water, give me water, over there!" I muttered in a faint voice, though
I was inwardly conscious that I could have got on very well without
water and without muttering in a faint voice.  But I was, what is
called, PUTTING IT ON, to save appearances, though the attack was a
genuine one.

She gave me water, looking at me in bewilderment.  At that moment
Apollon brought in the tea.  It suddenly seemed to me that this
commonplace, prosaic tea was horribly undignified and paltry after all
that had happened, and I blushed crimson.  Liza looked at Apollon with
positive alarm.  He went out without a glance at either of us.

"Liza, do you despise me?" I asked, looking at her fixedly, trembling
with impatience to know what she was thinking.

She was confused, and did not know what to answer.

"Drink your tea," I said to her angrily.  I was angry with myself, but,
of course, it was she who would have to pay for it.  A horrible spite
against her suddenly surged up in my heart; I believe I could have
killed her.  To revenge myself on her I swore inwardly not to say a
word to her all the time.  "She is the cause of it all," I thought.

Our silence lasted for five minutes.  The tea stood on the table; we
did not touch it.  I had got to the point of purposely refraining from
beginning in order to embarrass her further; it was awkward for her to
begin alone.  Several times she glanced at me with mournful perplexity.
I was obstinately silent.  I was, of course, myself the chief sufferer,
because I was fully conscious of the disgusting meanness of my spiteful
stupidity, and yet at the same time I could not restrain myself.

"I want to... get away ... from there altogether," she began, to break
the silence in some way, but, poor girl, that was just what she ought
not to have spoken about at such a stupid moment to a man so stupid as
I was. My heart positively ached with pity for her tactless and
unnecessary straightforwardness.  But something hideous at once stifled
all compassion in me; it even provoked me to greater venom.  I did not
care what happened.  Another five minutes passed.

"Perhaps I am in your way," she began timidly, hardly audibly, and was
getting up.

But as soon as I saw this first impulse of wounded dignity I positively
trembled with spite, and at once burst out.

"Why have you come to me, tell me that, please?" I began, gasping for
breath and regardless of logical connection in my words.  I longed to
have it all out at once, at one burst; I did not even trouble how to
begin.  "Why have you come?  Answer, answer," I cried, hardly knowing
what I was doing.  "I'll tell you, my good girl, why you have come.
You've come because I talked sentimental stuff to you then.  So now you
are soft as butter and longing for fine sentiments again.  So you may
as well know that I was laughing at you then.  And I am laughing at you
now.  Why are you shuddering?  Yes, I was laughing at you!  I had been
insulted just before, at dinner, by the fellows who came that evening
before me.  I came to you, meaning to thrash one of them, an officer;
but I didn't succeed, I didn't find him; I had to avenge the insult on
someone to get back my own again; you turned up, I vented my spleen on
you and laughed at you.  I had been humiliated, so I wanted to
humiliate; I had been treated like a rag, so I wanted to show my power....
That's what it was, and you imagined I had come there on purpose
to save you.  Yes?  You imagined that?  You imagined that?"

I knew that she would perhaps be muddled and not take it all in
exactly, but I knew, too, that she would grasp the gist of it, very
well indeed.  And so, indeed, she did.  She turned white as a
handkerchief, tried to say something, and her lips worked painfully;
but she sank on a chair as though she had been felled by an axe.  And
all the time afterwards she listened to me with her lips parted and her
eyes wide open, shuddering with awful terror.  The cynicism, the
cynicism of my words overwhelmed her....

"Save you!" I went on, jumping up from my chair and running up and down
the room before her.  "Save you from what?  But perhaps I am worse than
you myself.  Why didn't you throw it in my teeth when I was giving you
that sermon: 'But what did you come here yourself for?  was it to read
us a sermon?'  Power, power was what I wanted then, sport was what I
wanted, I wanted to wring out your tears, your humiliation, your
hysteria--that was what I wanted then!  Of course, I couldn't keep it
up then, because I am a wretched creature, I was frightened, and, the
devil knows why, gave you my address in my folly.  Afterwards, before I
got home, I was cursing and swearing at you because of that address, I
hated you already because of the lies I had told you.  Because I only
like playing with words, only dreaming, but, do you know, what I really
want is that you should all go to hell.  That is what I want.  I want
peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so
long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go
without my tea?  I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I
always get my tea.  Did you know that, or not?  Well, anyway, I know
that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard.  Here I
have been shuddering for the last three days at the thought of your
coming.  And do you know what has worried me particularly for these
three days?  That I posed as such a hero to you, and now you would see
me in a wretched torn dressing-gown, beggarly, loathsome. I told you
just now that I was not ashamed of my poverty; so you may as well know
that I am ashamed of it; I am more ashamed of it than of anything, more
afraid of it than of being found out if I were a thief, because I am as
vain as though I had been skinned and the very air blowing on me hurt.
Surely by now you must realise that I shall never forgive you for
having found me in this wretched dressing-gown, just as I was flying at
Apollon like a spiteful cur.  The saviour, the former hero, was flying
like a mangy, unkempt sheep-dog at his lackey, and the lackey was
jeering at him!  And I shall never forgive you for the tears I could
not help shedding before you just now, like some silly woman put to
shame!  And for what I am confessing to you now, I shall never forgive
you either! Yes--you must answer for it all because you turned up like
this, because I am a blackguard, because I am the nastiest, stupidest,
absurdest and most envious of all the worms on earth, who are not a bit
better than I am, but, the devil knows why, are never put to confusion;
while I shall always be insulted by every louse, that is my doom!  And
what is it to me that you don't understand a word of this!  And what do
I care, what do I care about you, and whether you go to ruin there or
not?  Do you understand?  How I shall hate you now after saying this,
for having been here and listening. Why, it's not once in a lifetime a
man speaks out like this, and then it is in hysterics!  ...  What more
do you want?  Why do you still stand confronting me, after all this?
Why are you worrying me?  Why don't you go?"

But at this point a strange thing happened.  I was so accustomed to
think and imagine everything from books, and to picture everything in
the world to myself just as I had made it up in my dreams beforehand,
that I could not all at once take in this strange circumstance.  What
happened was this: Liza, insulted and crushed by me, understood a great
deal more than I imagined.  She understood from all this what a woman
understands first of all, if she feels genuine love, that is, that I
was myself unhappy.

The frightened and wounded expression on her face was followed first by
a look of sorrowful perplexity.  When I began calling myself a
scoundrel and a blackguard and my tears flowed (the tirade was
accompanied throughout by tears) her whole face worked convulsively.
She was on the point of getting up and stopping me; when I finished she
took no notice of my shouting: "Why are you here, why don't you go
away?" but realised only that it must have been very bitter to me to
say all this.  Besides, she was so crushed, poor girl; she considered
herself infinitely beneath me; how could she feel anger or resentment?
She suddenly leapt up from her chair with an irresistible impulse and
held out her hands, yearning towards me, though still timid and not
daring to stir....  At this point there was a revulsion in my heart
too.  Then she suddenly rushed to me, threw her arms round me and burst
into tears.  I, too, could not restrain myself, and sobbed as I never
had before.

"They won't let me ... I can't be good!" I managed to articulate; then
I went to the sofa, fell on it face downwards, and sobbed on it for a
quarter of an hour in genuine hysterics.  She came close to me, put her
arms round me and stayed motionless in that position.  But the trouble
was that the hysterics could not go on for ever, and (I am writing the
loathsome truth) lying face downwards on the sofa with my face thrust
into my nasty leather pillow, I began by degrees to be aware of a
far-away, involuntary but irresistible feeling that it would be awkward
now for me to raise my head and look Liza straight in the face.  Why
was I ashamed?  I don't know, but I was ashamed.  The thought, too,
came into my overwrought brain that our parts now were completely
changed, that she was now the heroine, while I was just a crushed and
humiliated creature as she had been before me that night--four days
before....  And all this came into my mind during the minutes I was
lying on my face on the sofa.

My God! surely I was not envious of her then.

I don't know, to this day I cannot decide, and at the time, of course,
I was still less able to understand what I was feeling than now.  I
cannot get on without domineering and tyrannising over someone, but ...
there is no explaining anything by reasoning and so it is useless to
reason.

I conquered myself, however, and raised my head; I had to do so sooner
or later ... and I am convinced to this day that it was just because I
was ashamed to look at her that another feeling was suddenly kindled
and flamed up in my heart ... a feeling of mastery and possession.  My
eyes gleamed with passion, and I gripped her hands tightly.  How I
hated her and how I was drawn to her at that minute!  The one feeling
intensified the other.  It was almost like an act of vengeance.  At
first there was a look of amazement, even of terror on her face, but
only for one instant. She warmly and rapturously embraced me.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: When Liza appears one evening unexpectedly, the Underground Man is horrified. He explains: "I stood before her, crushed, humiliated, abominably ashamed. This shame he turns into spite, and he humiliates her, telling her that he was laughing at her that night. Yet Liza seems to understand him, meaning she realizes how pitiful and vulnerable he is. When he bursts into tears, she comforts and embraces him. This causes the UM to realize that instead of him being her hero, she has indeed become his heroine


prompt:
Chapter: A quarter of an hour later I was rushing up and down the room in
frenzied impatience, from minute to minute I went up to the screen and
peeped through the crack at Liza.  She was sitting on the ground with
her head leaning against the bed, and must have been crying.  But she
did not go away, and that irritated me.  This time she understood it
all.  I had insulted her finally, but ... there's no need to describe
it.  She realised that my outburst of passion had been simply revenge,
a fresh humiliation, and that to my earlier, almost causeless hatred
was added now a PERSONAL HATRED, born of envy....  Though I do not
maintain positively that she understood all this distinctly; but she
certainly did fully understand that I was a despicable man, and what
was worse, incapable of loving her.

I know I shall be told that this is incredible--but it is incredible to
be as spiteful and stupid as I was; it may be added that it was strange
I should not love her, or at any rate, appreciate her love.  Why is it
strange?  In the first place, by then I was incapable of love, for I
repeat, with me loving meant tyrannising and showing my moral
superiority.  I have never in my life been able to imagine any other
sort of love, and have nowadays come to the point of sometimes thinking
that love really consists in the right--freely given by the beloved
object--to tyrannise over her.

Even in my underground dreams I did not imagine love except as a
struggle.  I began it always with hatred and ended it with moral
subjugation, and afterwards I never knew what to do with the subjugated
object. And what is there to wonder at in that, since I had succeeded
in so corrupting myself, since I was so out of touch with "real life,"
as to have actually thought of reproaching her, and putting her to
shame for having come to me to hear "fine sentiments"; and did not even
guess that she had come not to hear fine sentiments, but to love me,
because to a woman all reformation, all salvation from any sort of
ruin, and all moral renewal is included in love and can only show
itself in that form.

I did not hate her so much, however, when I was running about the room
and peeping through the crack in the screen.  I was only insufferably
oppressed by her being here.  I wanted her to disappear.  I wanted
"peace," to be left alone in my underground world.  Real life oppressed
me with its novelty so much that I could hardly breathe.

But several minutes passed and she still remained, without stirring, as
though she were unconscious.  I had the shamelessness to tap softly at
the screen as though to remind her....  She started, sprang up, and
flew to seek her kerchief, her hat, her coat, as though making her
escape from me....  Two minutes later she came from behind the screen
and looked with heavy eyes at me.  I gave a spiteful grin, which was
forced, however, to KEEP UP APPEARANCES, and I turned away from her
eyes.

"Good-bye," she said, going towards the door.

I ran up to her, seized her hand, opened it, thrust something in it and
closed it again.  Then I turned at once and dashed away in haste to the
other corner of the room to avoid seeing, anyway....

I did mean a moment since to tell a lie--to write that I did this
accidentally, not knowing what I was doing through foolishness, through
losing my head.  But I don't want to lie, and so I will say straight
out that I opened her hand and put the money in it ... from spite.  It
came into my head to do this while I was running up and down the room
and she was sitting behind the screen.  But this I can say for certain:
though I did that cruel thing purposely, it was not an impulse from the
heart, but came from my evil brain.  This cruelty was so affected, so
purposely made up, so completely a product of the brain, of books, that
I could not even keep it up a minute--first I dashed away to avoid
seeing her, and then in shame and despair rushed after Liza.  I opened
the door in the passage and began listening.

"Liza!  Liza!" I cried on the stairs, but in a low voice, not boldly.
There was no answer, but I fancied I heard her footsteps, lower down on
the stairs.

"Liza!" I cried, more loudly.

No answer.  But at that minute I heard the stiff outer glass door open
heavily with a creak and slam violently; the sound echoed up the stairs.

She had gone.  I went back to my room in hesitation.  I felt horribly
oppressed.

I stood still at the table, beside the chair on which she had sat and
looked aimlessly before me.  A minute passed, suddenly I started;
straight before me on the table I saw....  In short, I saw a crumpled
blue five-rouble note, the one I had thrust into her hand a minute
before.  It was the same note; it could be no other, there was no other
in the flat.  So she had managed to fling it from her hand on the table
at the moment when I had dashed into the further corner.

Well!  I might have expected that she would do that.  Might I have
expected it?  No, I was such an egoist, I was so lacking in respect for
my fellow-creatures that I could not even imagine she would do so.  I
could not endure it.  A minute later I flew like a madman to dress,
flinging on what I could at random and ran headlong after her.  She
could not have got two hundred paces away when I ran out into the
street.

It was a still night and the snow was coming down in masses and falling
almost perpendicularly, covering the pavement and the empty street as
though with a pillow.  There was no one in the street, no sound was to
be heard.  The street lamps gave a disconsolate and useless glimmer.  I
ran two hundred paces to the cross-roads and stopped short.

Where had she gone?  And why was I running after her?

Why?  To fall down before her, to sob with remorse, to kiss her feet,
to entreat her forgiveness!  I longed for that, my whole breast was
being rent to pieces, and never, never shall I recall that minute with
indifference. But--what for?  I thought.  Should I not begin to hate
her, perhaps, even tomorrow, just because I had kissed her feet today?
Should I give her happiness?  Had I not recognised that day, for the
hundredth time, what I was worth?  Should I not torture her?

I stood in the snow, gazing into the troubled darkness and pondered
this.

"And will it not be better?" I mused fantastically, afterwards at home,
stifling the living pang of my heart with fantastic dreams.  "Will it
not be better that she should keep the resentment of the insult for
ever? Resentment--why, it is purification; it is a most stinging and
painful consciousness!  Tomorrow I should have defiled her soul and
have exhausted her heart, while now the feeling of insult will never
die in her heart, and however loathsome the filth awaiting her--the
feeling of insult will elevate and purify her ... by hatred ... h'm!
... perhaps, too, by forgiveness....  Will all that make things easier
for her though? ..."

And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which
is better--cheap happiness or exalted sufferings?  Well, which is
better?

So I dreamed as I sat at home that evening, almost dead with the pain
in my soul.  Never had I endured such suffering and remorse, yet could
there have been the faintest doubt when I ran out from my lodging that
I should turn back half-way?  I never met Liza again and I have heard
nothing of her.  I will add, too, that I remained for a long time
afterwards pleased with the phrase about the benefit from resentment
and hatred in spite of the fact that I almost fell ill from misery.

      *      *      *      *      *

Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory.
I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn't I better end my "Notes"
here?  I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I
have felt ashamed all the time I've been writing this story; so it's
hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell
long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally
rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through
divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world,
would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the
traits for an anti-hero are EXPRESSLY gathered together here, and what
matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all
divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less.
We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for
real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come
almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and
we are all privately agreed that it is better in books.  And why do we
fuss and fume sometimes?  Why are we perverse and ask for something
else?  We don't know what ourselves.  It would be the worse for us if
our petulant prayers were answered.  Come, try, give any one of us, for
instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the
spheres of our activity, relax the control and we ... yes, I assure you
... we should be begging to be under control again at once.  I know
that you will very likely be angry with me for that, and will begin
shouting and stamping.  Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your
miseries in your underground holes, and don't dare to say all of
us--excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that "all of
us."  As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life
carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and
what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have
found comfort in deceiving yourselves.  So that perhaps, after all,
there is more life in me than in you.  Look into it more carefully!
Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it
is called?  Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in
confusion at once.  We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling
to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise.
We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and
blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive
to be some sort of impossible generalised man.  We are stillborn, and
for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and
that suits us better and better.  We are developing a taste for it.
Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea.  But enough; I
don't want to write more from "Underground."

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The UM realizes that his idea of love is simply "tyrannizing and demonstrating  moral superiority." For this reason he tries to give her a five-ruble note; but she doesn't accept it, making him even more miserable. For the UM realizes that his love has been tainted by his books, by his head. Liza, on the other hand, shows him true love, love from the heart-selfless love. Thus, the UM concludes that he has ruined his life "through moral decay in  corner." Not living up to his own self-framed image of himself as a hero, he is, indeed, the epitome of an anti-hero. Lastly, he returns to his idea that suffering and anguish can be man's most advantageous advantage. He finds a certain satisfaction and truthfulness in his own suffering, and hopes that Liza will find a similar satisfaction, despite the obvious hardship and grief that the said suffering will entail.


prompt:
Chapter: I am a sick man....  I am a spiteful man.  I am an unattractive man.  I
believe my liver is diseased.  However, I know nothing at all about my
disease, and do not know for certain what ails me.  I don't consult a
doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and
doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to
respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be
superstitious, 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 service, 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 out 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 anybody 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 afterwards 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 official.  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
opposite elements. 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....

It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to
become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an
honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.  Now, I am living out my life
in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation
that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is
only the fool who becomes anything.  Yes, a man in the nineteenth
century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless
creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited
creature.  That is my conviction of forty years.  I am forty years old
now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is
extreme old age.  To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is
vulgar, immoral.  Who does live beyond forty?  Answer that, sincerely
and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows.  I
tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all
these silver-haired and reverend seniors!  I tell the whole world that
to its face!  I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to
sixty myself.  To seventy!  To eighty! ...  Stay, let me take breath
...

You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you.  You are
mistaken in that, too.  I am by no means such a mirthful person as you
imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated by all this babble
(and I feel that you are irritated) you think fit to ask me who I
am--then my answer is, I am a collegiate assessor.  I was in the
service that I might have something to eat (and solely for that
reason), and when last year a distant relation left me six thousand
roubles in his will I immediately retired from the service and settled
down in my corner.  I used to live in this corner before, but now I
have settled down in it.  My room is a wretched, horrid one in the
outskirts of the town.  My servant is an old country-woman, ill-natured
from stupidity, and, moreover, there is always a nasty smell about her.
I am told that the Petersburg climate is bad for me, and that with my
small means it is very expensive to live in Petersburg.  I know all
that better than all these sage and experienced counsellors and
monitors....  But I am remaining in Petersburg; I am not going away
from Petersburg!  I am not going away because ... ech!  Why, it is
absolutely no matter whether I am going away or not going away.

But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?

Answer: Of himself.

Well, so I will talk about myself.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Dostoevsky begins with a footnote in which he explains that the narrator is imaginary; but he claims people such as the narrator must exist, for he represents all of those who are forced to live "underground" because they cannot relate to or accept the society as it exists.


prompt:
Chapter: I want now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not,
why I could not even become an insect.  I tell you solemnly, that I
have many times tried to become an insect.  But I was not equal even to
that.  I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness--a
real thorough-going illness.  For man's everyday needs, it would have
been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is,
half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated
man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal
ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional
town on the whole terrestrial globe.  (There are intentional and
unintentional towns.)  It would have been quite enough, for instance,
to have the consciousness by which all so-called direct persons and men
of action live.  I bet you think I am writing all this from
affectation, to be witty at the expense of men of action; and what is
more, that from ill-bred affectation, I am clanking a sword like my
officer.  But, gentlemen, whoever can pride himself on his diseases and
even swagger over them?

Though, after all, everyone does do that; people do pride themselves on
their diseases, and I do, may be, more than anyone.  We will not
dispute it; my contention was absurd.  But yet I am firmly persuaded
that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in
fact, is a disease.  I stick to that.  Let us leave that, too, for a
minute.  Tell me this: why does it happen that at the very, yes, at the
very moments when I am most capable of feeling every refinement of all
that is "sublime and beautiful," as they used to say at one time, it
would, as though of design, happen to me not only to feel but to do
such ugly things, such that ... Well, in short, actions that all,
perhaps, commit; but which, as though purposely, occurred to me at the
very time when I was most conscious that they ought not to be
committed.  The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was
"sublime and beautiful," the more deeply I sank into my mire and the
more ready I was to sink in it altogether.  But the chief point was
that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me, but as though it
were bound to be so.  It was as though it were my most normal
condition, and not in the least disease or depravity, so that at last
all desire in me to struggle against this depravity passed.  It ended
by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was
perhaps my normal condition.  But at first, in the beginning, what
agonies I endured in that struggle!  I did not believe it was the same
with other people, and all my life I hid this fact about myself as a
secret.  I was ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed): I got to the
point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in
returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night,
acutely conscious that that day I had committed a loathsome action
again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly
gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at
last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness,
and at last--into positive real enjoyment! Yes, into enjoyment, into
enjoyment!  I insist upon that.  I have spoken of this because I keep
wanting to know for a fact whether other people feel such enjoyment?  I
will explain; the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness
of one's own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had
reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not
be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could
become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you
to change into something different you would most likely not wish to
change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because
perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.

And the worst of it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in
accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness,
and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that
consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely
nothing.  Thus it would follow, as the result of acute consciousness,
that one is not to blame in being a scoundrel; as though that were any
consolation to the scoundrel once he has come to realise that he
actually is a scoundrel.  But enough....  Ech, I have talked a lot of
nonsense, but what have I explained?  How is enjoyment in this to be
explained?  But I will explain it.  I will get to the bottom of it!
That is why I have taken up my pen....

I, for instance, have a great deal of AMOUR PROPRE.  I am as suspicious
and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf.  But upon my word I
sometimes have had moments when if I had happened to be slapped in the
face I should, perhaps, have been positively glad of it.  I say, in
earnest, that I should probably have been able to discover even in that
a peculiar sort of enjoyment--the enjoyment, of course, of despair; but
in despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one
is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position.  And
when one is slapped in the face--why then the consciousness of being
rubbed into a pulp would positively overwhelm one.  The worst of it is,
look at it which way one will, it still turns out that I was always the
most to blame in everything.  And what is most humiliating of all, to
blame for no fault of my own but, so to say, through the laws of
nature.  In the first place, to blame because I am cleverer than any of
the people surrounding me.  (I have always considered myself cleverer
than any of the people surrounding me, and sometimes, would you believe
it, have been positively ashamed of it.  At any rate, I have all my
life, as it were, turned my eyes away and never could look people
straight in the face.)  To blame, finally, because even if I had had
magnanimity, I should only have had more suffering from the sense of
its uselessness.  I should certainly have never been able to do
anything from being magnanimous--neither to forgive, for my assailant
would perhaps have slapped me from the laws of nature, and one cannot
forgive the laws of nature; nor to forget, for even if it were owing to
the laws of nature, it is insulting all the same.  Finally, even if I
had wanted to be anything but magnanimous, had desired on the contrary
to revenge myself on my assailant, I could not have revenged myself on
any one for anything because I should certainly never have made up my
mind to do anything, even if I had been able to.  Why should I not have
made up my mind?  About that in particular I want to say a few words.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The narrator believes that he suffers from excessive consciousness, a disease that causes inertia and renders him incapable of either changing or wanting to change himself. He admits it is a disease that has led him into depravity. After struggling with the feeling of shame that accompanies his depravity, he has come to accept it as normal and find pleasure in it. There are other contradictions presented by the narrator about himself in the chapter. He says he sometimes has beautiful thoughts, which lead him to do ugly things. He claims that "the more conscious I was of goodness...the more deeply I sank into my mire. Although he admits he lives in misery, he claims he enjoys the condition. In the past, the narrator has wished he could become something else, like an insect. Although he would like to change, he knows that he never will, for he thinks about things rather than acting upon them.


prompt:
Chapter: With people who know how to revenge themselves and to stand up for
themselves in general, how is it done?  Why, when they are possessed,
let us suppose, by the feeling of revenge, then for the time there is
nothing else but that feeling left in their whole being.  Such a
gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull
with its horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him.  (By the
way: facing the wall, such gentlemen--that is, the "direct" persons and
men of action--are genuinely nonplussed.  For them a wall is not an
evasion, as for us people who think and consequently do nothing; it is
not an excuse for turning aside, an excuse for which we are always very
glad, though we scarcely believe in it ourselves, as a rule.  No, they
are nonplussed in all sincerity.  The wall has for them something
tranquillising, morally soothing, final--maybe even something
mysterious ... but of the wall later.)

Well, such a direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his
tender mother nature wished to see him when she graciously brought him
into being on the earth.  I envy such a man till I am green in the
face.  He is stupid.  I am not disputing that, but perhaps the normal
man should be stupid, how do you know?  Perhaps it is very beautiful,
in fact.  And I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can
call it so, by the fact that if you take, for instance, the antithesis
of the normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness, who has
come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort (this
is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this
retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his
antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness he genuinely
thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man.  It may be an acutely
conscious mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and
therefore, et caetera, et caetera.  And the worst of it is, he himself,
his very own self, looks on himself as a mouse; no one asks him to do
so; and that is an important point.  Now let us look at this mouse in
action.  Let us suppose, for instance, that it feels insulted, too (and
it almost always does feel insulted), and wants to revenge itself, too.
There may even be a greater accumulation of spite in it than in L'HOMME
DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE.  The base and nasty desire to vent that
spite on its assailant rankles perhaps even more nastily in it than in
L'HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE.  For through his innate stupidity
the latter looks upon his revenge as justice pure and simple; while in
consequence of his acute consciousness the mouse does not believe in
the justice of it.  To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act
of revenge.  Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless
mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the
form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many
unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of
fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of
the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand
solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their
healthy sides ache.  Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss
all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt
in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its
mouse-hole.  There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our
insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in
cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite.  For forty years
together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most
ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still
more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own
imagination.  It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it
will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will
invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things
might happen, and will forgive nothing.  Maybe it will begin to revenge
itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind
the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to
vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its
efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom
it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself.
On its deathbed it will recall it all over again, with interest
accumulated over all the years and ...

But it is just in that cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in
that conscious burying oneself alive for grief in the underworld for
forty years, in that acutely recognised and yet partly doubtful
hopelessness of one's position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires
turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined
for ever and repented of again a minute later--that the savour of that
strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies.  It is so subtle, so
difficult of analysis, that persons who are a little limited, or even
simply persons of strong nerves, will not understand a single atom of
it.  "Possibly," you will add on your own account with a grin, "people
will not understand it either who have never received a slap in the
face," and in that way you will politely hint to me that I, too,
perhaps, have had the experience of a slap in the face in my life, and
so I speak as one who knows.  I bet that you are thinking that.  But
set your minds at rest, gentlemen, I have not received a slap in the
face, though it is absolutely a matter of indifference to me what you
may think about it. Possibly, I even regret, myself, that I have given
so few slaps in the face during my life.  But enough ... not another
word on that subject of such extreme interest to you.

I will continue calmly concerning persons with strong nerves who do not
understand a certain refinement of enjoyment.  Though in certain
circumstances these gentlemen bellow their loudest like bulls, though
this, let us suppose, does them the greatest credit, yet, as I have
said already, confronted with the impossible they subside at once.  The
impossible means the stone wall!  What stone wall?  Why, of course, the
laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics.  As
soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a
monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact.  When they
prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to
you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this
conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties
and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have just to accept it,
there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics.  Just
try refuting it.

"Upon my word, they will shout at you, it is no use protesting: it is a
case of twice two makes four!  Nature does not ask your permission, she
has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or
dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently
all her conclusions.  A wall, you see, is a wall ... and so on, and so
on."

Merciful Heavens!  but what do I care for the laws of nature and
arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact
that twice two makes four?  Of course I cannot break through the wall
by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to
knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because
it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.

As though such a stone wall really were a consolation, and really did
contain some word of conciliation, simply because it is as true as
twice two makes four.  Oh, absurdity of absurdities!  How much better
it is to understand it all, to recognise it all, all the
impossibilities and the stone wall; not to be reconciled to one of
those impossibilities and stone walls if it disgusts you to be
reconciled to it; by the way of the most inevitable, logical
combinations to reach the most revolting conclusions on the everlasting
theme, that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame,
though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least,
and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into
luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for
you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never
will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a
bit of juggling, a card-sharper's trick, that it is simply a mess, no
knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these
uncertainties and jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and the
more you do not know, the worse the ache.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The narrator believes that he suffers from excessive consciousness, a disease that causes inertia and renders him incapable of either changing or wanting to change himself. He admits it is a disease that has led him into depravity. After struggling with the feeling of shame that accompanies his depravity, he has come to accept it as normal and find pleasure in it. There are other contradictions presented by the narrator about himself in the chapter. He says he sometimes has beautiful thoughts, which lead him to do ugly things. He claims that "the more conscious I was of goodness...the more deeply I sank into my mire. Although he admits he lives in misery, he claims he enjoys the condition. In the past, the narrator has wished he could become something else, like an insect. Although he would like to change, he knows that he never will, for he thinks about things rather than acting upon them.


prompt:
Chapter: "Ha, ha, ha!  You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you
cry, with a laugh.

"Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer.  I had
toothache for a whole month and I know there is.  In that case, of
course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not
candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole
point.  The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans;
if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan.  It is a good
example, gentlemen, and I will develop it.  Those moans express in the
first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating
to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you
spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same
while she does not.  They express the consciousness that you have no
enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in
spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your
teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and
if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that
finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is
left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your
wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more.
Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown,
end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree
of voluptuousness.  I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans
of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache,
on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan,
not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has
toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by
progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the
soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days.  His
moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days
and nights.  And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no
sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is
only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows
that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his
whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of
faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently,
more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing
himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy.  Well, in all these
recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure.
As though he would say: "I am worrying you, I am lacerating your
hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake.  Well, stay awake
then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache.  I am not a
hero to you now, as I tried to seem before, but simply a nasty person,
an impostor.  Well, so be it, then!  I am very glad that you see
through me.  It is nasty for you to hear my despicable moans: well, let
it be nasty; here I will let you have a nastier flourish in a
minute...."  You do not understand even now, gentlemen?  No, it seems
our  development and our consciousness must go further to understand
all the intricacies of this pleasure.  You laugh?  Delighted.  My
jests, gentlemen, are of course in bad taste, jerky, involved, lacking
self-confidence.  But of course that is because I do not respect
myself.  Can a man of perception respect himself at all?

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The narrator explains how people find pleasure in the pain they are suffering. He uses a toothache as an example. A person moans when his tooth hurts, because there is a kind of pleasure in the moaning. When the moaning is heard by another person, it is even more pleasurable, for the moaner is inflicting his suffering upon someone else.


prompt:
Chapter: Come, can a man who attempts to find enjoyment in the very feeling of
his own degradation possibly have a spark of respect for himself?  I am
not saying this now from any mawkish kind of remorse.  And, indeed, I
could never endure saying, "Forgive me, Papa, I won't do it again," not
because I am incapable of saying that--on the contrary, perhaps just
because I have been too capable of it, and in what a way, too.  As
though of design I used to get into trouble in cases when I was not to
blame in any way.  That was the nastiest part of it.  At the same time
I was genuinely touched and penitent, I used to shed tears and, of
course, deceived myself, though I was not acting in the least and there
was a sick feeling in my heart at the time....  For that one could not
blame even the laws of nature, though the laws of nature have
continually all my life offended me more than anything.  It is
loathsome to remember it all, but it was loathsome even then.  Of
course, a minute or so later I would realise wrathfully that it was all
a lie, a revolting lie, an affected lie, that is, all this penitence,
this emotion, these vows of reform.  You will ask why did I worry
myself with such antics: answer, because it was very dull to sit with
one's hands folded, and so one began cutting capers.  That is really
it.  Observe yourselves more carefully, gentlemen, then you will
understand that it is so. I invented adventures for myself and made up
a life, so as at least to live in some way.  How many times it has
happened to me--well, for instance, to take offence simply on purpose,
for nothing; and one knows oneself, of course, that one is offended at
nothing; that one is putting it on, but yet one brings oneself at last
to the point of being really offended. All my life I have had an
impulse to play such pranks, so that in the end I could not control it
in myself.  Another time, twice, in fact, I tried hard to be in love.
I suffered, too, gentlemen, I assure you.  In the depth of my heart
there was no faith in my suffering, only a faint stir of mockery, but
yet I did suffer, and in the real, orthodox way; I was jealous, beside
myself ... and it was all from ENNUI, gentlemen, all from ENNUI;
inertia overcame me.  You know the direct, legitimate fruit of
consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious
sitting-with-the-hands-folded.  I have referred to this already.  I
repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all "direct" persons and men of action
are active just because they are stupid and limited.  How explain that?
I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate
and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade
themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have
found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are
at ease and you know that is the chief thing.  To begin to act, you
know, you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of
doubt left in it.  Why, how am I, for example, to set my mind at rest?
Where are the primary causes on which I am to build?  Where are my
foundations?  Where am I to get them from?  I exercise myself in
reflection, and consequently with me every primary cause at once draws
after itself another still more primary, and so on to infinity.  That
is just the essence of every sort of consciousness and reflection.  It
must be a case of the laws of nature again.  What is the result of it
in the end?  Why, just the same.  Remember I spoke just now of
vengeance.  (I am sure you did not take it in.)  I said that a man
revenges himself because he sees justice in it. Therefore he has found
a primary cause, that is, justice.  And so he is at rest on all sides,
and consequently he carries out his revenge calmly and successfully,
being persuaded that he is doing a just and honest thing.  But I see no
justice in it, I find no sort of virtue in it either, and consequently
if I attempt to revenge myself, it is only out of spite.  Spite, of
course, might overcome everything, all my doubts, and so might serve
quite successfully in place of a primary cause, precisely because it is
not a cause.  But what is to be done if I have not even spite (I began
with that just now, you know).  In consequence again of those accursed
laws of consciousness, anger in me is subject to chemical
disintegration.  You look into it, the object flies off into air, your
reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes
not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which no
one is to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left
again--that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can.  So you give it up
with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause.
And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings, blindly,
without reflection, without a primary cause, repelling consciousness at
least for a time; hate or love, if only not to sit with your hands
folded.  The day after tomorrow, at the latest, you will begin
despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself.  Result: a
soap-bubble and inertia.  Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I
consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have
been able neither to begin nor to finish anything.  Granted I am a
babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us.  But what is to
be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is
babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The narrator explains how people find pleasure in the pain they are suffering. He uses a toothache as an example. A person moans when his tooth hurts, because there is a kind of pleasure in the moaning. When the moaning is heard by another person, it is even more pleasurable, for the moaner is inflicting his suffering upon someone else.


prompt:
Chapter: Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness!  Heavens, how I should
have respected myself, then.  I should have respected myself because I
should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least
have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could
have believed myself.  Question:  What is he?  Answer:  A sluggard; how
very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself!  It would
mean that I was positively defined, it would mean that there was
something to say about me. "Sluggard"--why, it is a calling and
vocation, it is a career.  Do not jest, it is so.  I should then be a
member of the best club by right, and should find my occupation in
continually respecting myself.  I knew a gentleman who prided himself
all his life on being a connoisseur of Lafitte.  He considered this as
his positive virtue, and never doubted himself.  He died, not simply
with a tranquil, but with a triumphant conscience, and he was quite
right, too.  Then I should have chosen a career for myself, I should
have been a sluggard and a glutton, not a simple one, but, for
instance, one with sympathies for everything sublime and beautiful.
How do you like that?  I have long had visions of it.  That "sublime
and beautiful" weighs heavily on my mind at forty But that is at forty;
then--oh, then it would have been different!  I should have found for
myself a form of activity in keeping with it, to be precise, drinking
to the health of everything "sublime and beautiful."  I should have
snatched at every opportunity to drop a tear into my glass and then to
drain it to all that is "sublime and beautiful."  I should then have
turned everything into the sublime and the beautiful; in the nastiest,
unquestionable trash, I should have sought out the sublime and the
beautiful.  I should have exuded tears like a wet sponge.  An artist,
for instance, paints a picture worthy of Gay.  At once I drink to the
health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I
love all that is "sublime and beautiful."  An author has written AS YOU
WILL: at once I drink to the health of "anyone you will" because I love
all that is "sublime and beautiful."

I should claim respect for doing so.  I should persecute anyone who
would not show me respect.  I should live at ease, I should die with
dignity, why, it is charming, perfectly charming!  And what a good
round belly I should have grown, what a treble chin I should have
established, what a ruby nose I should have coloured for myself, so
that everyone would have said, looking at me: "Here is an asset!  Here
is something real and solid!"  And, say what you like, it is very
agreeable to hear such remarks about oneself in this negative age.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The narrator explains how people find pleasure in the pain they are suffering. He uses a toothache as an example. A person moans when his tooth hurts, because there is a kind of pleasure in the moaning. When the moaning is heard by another person, it is even more pleasurable, for the moaner is inflicting his suffering upon someone else.


prompt:
Chapter: But these are all golden dreams.  Oh, tell me, who was it first
announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things
because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were
enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man
would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and
noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage,
he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all
know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests,
consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good?
Oh, the babe!  Oh, the pure, innocent child!  Why, in the first place,
when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has
acted only from his own interest?  What is to be done with the millions
of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully
understanding their real interests, have left them in the background
and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger,
compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were,
simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully,
struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the
darkness.  So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter
to them than any advantage....  Advantage! What is advantage?  And will
you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the
advantage of man consists?  And what if it so happens that a man's
advantage, SOMETIMES, not only may, but even must, consist in his
desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself and not
advantageous.  And if so, if there can be such a case, the whole
principle falls into dust.  What do you think--are there such cases?
You laugh; laugh away, gentlemen, but only answer me: have man's
advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty?  Are there not some
which not only have not been included but cannot possibly be included
under any classification?  You see, you gentlemen have, to the best of
my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the
averages of statistical figures and politico-economical formulas.  Your
advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace--and so on, and so
on. So that the man who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly
in opposition to all that list would to your thinking, and indeed mine,
too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute madman: would not he?
But, you know, this is what is surprising: why does it so happen that
all these statisticians, sages and lovers of humanity, when they reckon
up human advantages invariably leave out one?  They don't even take it
into their reckoning in the form in which it should be taken, and the
whole reckoning depends upon that.  It would be no greater matter, they
would simply have to take it, this advantage, and add it to the list.
But the trouble is, that this strange advantage does not fall under any
classification and is not in place in any list.  I have a friend for
instance ...  Ech! gentlemen, but of course he is your friend, too; and
indeed there is no one, no one to whom he is not a friend!  When he
prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to
you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with
the laws of reason and truth.  What is more, he will talk to you with
excitement and passion of the true normal interests of man; with irony
he will upbraid the short-sighted fools who do not understand their own
interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and, within a quarter
of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through
something inside him which is stronger than all his interests, he will
go off on quite a different tack--that is, act in direct opposition to
what he has just been saying about himself, in opposition to the laws
of reason, in opposition to his own advantage, in fact in opposition to
everything ...  I warn you that my friend is a compound personality and
therefore it is difficult to blame him as an individual.  The fact is,
gentlemen, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to
almost every man than his greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical)
there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which
we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than
all other advantages, for the sake of which a man if necessary is ready
to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason,
honour, peace, prosperity--in fact, in opposition to all those
excellent and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental,
most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all.  "Yes, but
it's advantage all the same," you will retort.  But excuse me, I'll
make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What
matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that
it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every
system constructed by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind.  In
fact, it upsets everything.  But before I mention this advantage to
you, I want to compromise myself personally, and therefore I boldly
declare that all these fine systems, all these theories for explaining
to mankind their real normal interests, in order that inevitably
striving to pursue these interests they may at once become good and
noble--are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises!  Yes,
logical exercises.  Why, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of
mankind by means of the pursuit of his own advantage is to my mind
almost the same thing ... as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle,
that through civilisation mankind becomes softer, and consequently less
bloodthirsty and less fitted for warfare.  Logically it does seem to
follow from his arguments. But man has such a predilection for systems
and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth
intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to
justify his logic.  I take this example because it is the most glaring
instance of it.  Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams,
and in the merriest way, as though it were champagne.  Take the whole
of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived.  Take Napoleon--the
Great and also the present one.  Take North America--the eternal union.
Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein.... And what is it that
civilisation softens in us?  The only gain of civilisation for mankind
is the greater capacity for variety of sensations--and absolutely
nothing more.  And through the development of this many-sidedness man
may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed.  In fact, this has already
happened to him.  Have you noticed that it is the most civilised
gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas
and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so
conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they
are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to
us.  In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more
bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty.  In
old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace
exterminated those he thought proper.  Now we do think bloodshed
abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy
than ever. Which is worse?  Decide that for yourselves.  They say that
Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking
gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from
their screams and writhings.  You will say that that was in the
comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too,
because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that
though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages,
he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would
dictate.  But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn
when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and
science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a
normal direction.  You are confident that then man will cease from
INTENTIONAL error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set
his will against his normal interests. That is not all; then, you say,
science itself will teach man (though to my mind it's a superfluous
luxury) that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own,
and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the
stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws
of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it,
but is done of itself, by the laws of nature.  Consequently we have
only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to
answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him.
All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these
laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and
entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain
edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which
everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will
be no more incidents or adventures in the world.

Then--this is all what you say--new economic relations will be
established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical
exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the
twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be
provided.  Then the "Palace of Crystal" will be built.  Then ...  In
fact, those will be halcyon days.  Of course there is no guaranteeing
(this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully
dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be
calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand everything will be
extraordinarily rational.  Of course boredom may lead you to anything.
It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that
would not matter.  What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I
dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.  Man is
stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all
stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like
him in all creation.  I, for instance, would not be in the least
surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of
general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a
reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his
arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick
over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to
send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more
at our own sweet foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what
is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers--such is the
nature of man.  And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one
would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere
and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose
and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated.  And one may
choose what is contrary to one's own interests, and sometimes one
POSITIVELY OUGHT (that is my idea).  One's own free unfettered choice,
one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at
times to frenzy--is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we
have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which
all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.  And
how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice?
What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally
advantageous choice?  What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice,
whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.  And
choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The underground man rejects the notion that an enlightened, educated man will automatically be drawn towards what is good because it is advantageous to him and society. He believes that intelligent people usually move toward difficult, sometimes harmful, situations because they hold self-will dearer than they do virtue and reason and believe that there can be pleasure in pain. The narrator believes, however, that the present age argues against self-will, believing that man's actions are governed by the laws of nature, making them scientifically calculable and predictable. The narrator does not ascribe to the scientific theories of the day and does not believe that man acts according to science and reason. He feels man should be free to act in whatever way he desires, whether it is advantageous or not.