Notes from Underground — My Own Brain's Scan
Notes from Underground — My Own Brain's Scan
Every page of Notes from Underground feels like a scan of my own brain — each sentence dissecting the silent corridors of my mind, each word echoing the laughter that hides beneath my scream.
It's a book that gives both pain and pleasure, as if Dostoevsky had carved it out of my skull long before I was born.
I often wonder when, or how, I stumbled upon Russian literature. The story itself has become my own myth—part memory, part fabrication, part desperate need to believe I was destined for this particular kind of suffering.
My first encounter was with Gorky's Mother, in Nepali translation. I remember being mesmerized by its raw prose, its earthbound humanity. At that time, Nepali literary circles were drunk on Russian literature; names like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov floated like sacred mantras in smoky tea shops and dim libraries.
After Mother, I was starving — not for stories, but for something deeper, soul-soothing, something that could peel the skin off existence and show me the raw meat underneath. In my book The Outsider, I have written:
"Yes, I resonated with every transformation that had occurred in literature, philosophy, and the arts because my younger self had to cling to some kind of mythology or intellectuals — Camus, Sartre, German and French thinkers — as a way of making sense of the excruciating knowledge that my existence was not singular but a battlefield of masks, forces, and identities."
Like Dostoevsky's Double, I did face the horror of existence — the horror of the first half, second half, and the remaining — a shadow replica of existence that made me aware of the terrifying 'otherness'. 2 Which I have explained further in my upcoming book in hundreds of pages.
🤔 Personal Reflection #1: The Hunger
Looking back, I realize I wasn't looking for entertainment. I was looking for diagnosis. Like a man with a mysterious illness googling symptoms at 3 AM, I was searching through literature for someone to name the thing I couldn't name myself. 3 That time I actually googled about secret suicide websites forums. That restlessness. That constant feeling of being slightly outside my own life, watching myself perform the role of "me" without ever fully inhabiting it.
The Discovery (or: How I Met My Literary Doppelgänger)
Then came that man with the round glasses and his eternal tragedy, Anna Karenina. Through Tolstoy, I began to sense the vast, aching soul of Russia. But when I finally found Notes from Underground, my search ended abruptly — or perhaps began anew, in a darker realm.
I was too satisfied, almost terrified. It felt as though Dostoevsky had reached into my skull and transcribed my hidden monologues, my contradictions, my absurd pride, my paralysis of will.
1) The Underground Man became my double.
He was me, in another tongue, in another century. His pain was mine; his laughter, too. I discovered that thin, fragile book not as a reader, but as someone unearthing a forgotten bone of his own body. We were the same species of miserable: too conscious to be happy, too intelligent to be simple, too proud to ask for help, too self-aware to ever just shut up and live.
🤔 Personal Reflection #2: The Paralysis
The Underground Man suffers from what I call "the Disease of Infinite Analysis." He can't do ANYTHING without first dissecting why he wants to do it, what it means, what others will think, whether his desire is authentic or performed, whether his authenticity is itself a performance. By the time he finishes thinking, the moment for action has passed. I recognize this disease because I have it. I've spent entire parties analyzing why I'm not enjoying the party instead of just leaving. I've ruined relationships by questioning whether my love was "real enough." The Underground Man taught me: some of us think ourselves to death.
2) Self-awareness is both salvation and curse.
The Underground Man taught me that consciousness is beautiful torture. He overthinks every action, dissects every motive, and paralyzes himself with infinite self-analysis. I recognized myself in his painful hyperawareness — that inability to simply be without constantly observing yourself being.
3) Pride and humiliation are lovers.
The most shocking discovery: how the Underground Man luxuriates in his own humiliation, how he wraps his wounded pride around himself like a blanket. He's too proud to be simple, too intelligent to be happy, too conscious to act. This paradox lives in my chest like a second heart.
He goes to a party where he knows he'll be humiliated, and he goes PRECISELY BECAUSE he'll be humiliated. His pride feeds on indignity. He needs to feel superior even in his inferiority. Especially in his inferiority.
🤔 Personal Reflection #3: My Own Underground 4 Even first this blog's description was titled "Basement of my Mind".
I once showed up to a gathering where I knew I wasn't really invited. Not crashed—I was technically allowed, but clearly not wanted. Why did I go? Because I wanted to FEEL the rejection, to confirm my suspicion that I don't belong anywhere. The Underground Man would understand. We cultivate our own wounds. We water our grudges like gardens. Sometimes I catch myself mid-thought: "Nobody understands me" and I realize I'm actually ENJOYING the loneliness, luxuriating in my misunderstood-genius complex. Then I feel ashamed of enjoying it. Then ashamed of the shame. It's turtles all the way down.
"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased."
These opening lines don't repel me — they embrace me. They say: welcome home, you beautiful disaster.
Living Underground (36 Years and Counting)
Since that day, Notes from Underground has never left me. It rests quietly on my bedside table, a sacred relic of my own dissection — a reminder that thinking too much is a disease of the soul.
🤔 Personal Reflection #4: Why I Keep Returning
I've read Notes from Underground maybe 30 times. Each time I think: "This time will be different. This time I'll learn from his mistakes. This time I won't identify so hard." And each time, by page 3, I'm nodding along like a congregation member at a sermon. "Yes, brother, preach!"
The book is both comfort and warning. It says: "You're not crazy for feeling this way" and also "This way of feeling will destroy you." It's like having an older brother who shares your addiction but got clean—he understands, but he also knows where this road leads.
Sometimes people ask me for book recommendations. I never recommend this book. It's not a book you recommend. It's a book that finds you when you're ready—or when you're broken enough. Like a virus that only infects certain blood types. You have to have the right kind of misery.
Sometimes, when I open it at night, I hear the whisper of the Underground Man — half mocking, half mourning. He reminds me that every human is a wounded philosopher, buried beneath layers of reason and regret.
That book is my mirror, my companion, and my curse.
I don't just read Notes from Underground — I live it.
What book feels like a scan of your own brain? What story did you discover not as a reader, but as someone recognizing their own reflection in words written by a stranger a hundred years ago?
Tell me. I promise I'll understand. We underground dwellers always do.
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