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?

 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.

