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.

 The UM now uses an analogy to make his point. He describes the normal, "stupid" person as an enraged bull rushing headlong into a wall at the slightest impulse. He likens himself, one who possesses a hyperconsciousness, to a mouse-the antithesis of a normal man, he says. While the bull acts on its rather simple mental reasoning, the mouse cannot act because its overly sophisticated mental processes perpetually plague it with doubt and vacillation, rendering him unable to do anything, save "creep ignominiously back into its mousehole. This hole, this underground, is the home of the UM and those like him. At the end of the chapter, the UM elaborates on the wall concept. The wall represents, he explains, "the laws of nature, the conclusions of natural science and mathematics. The wall also embodies such ideas as evolution, which Dostoevsky largely equated with atheism and socialism. While the man of action readily accepts the wall and its implications, the UM can't come to grips with the concept of the stone wall, the idea that "two times two makes four," because it makes man out to be an animal-a mere phenomenon of science, lacking the human component of free will

