Did my customary commute to sit with my friend and simulate some kind of human relationship. Came home and did four hours of painting to keep up with my new schedule, although I am already behind.
Listened to The Idiot throughout, which is not the masterpiece of the Brothers Karamazov but nevertheless resonates strongly with thoughts that return to me with a certain alienated majesty. Particularly the odious way mediocre men delude themselves into pursuing originality and pursue a horribly distorted image of themselves as something other than the perfect average that they truly are. This is how I feel having met diverse people at the party last night -- all of whom have some better mastery of any of the facets of my personality that I hold so erroneously dear as though they are rare and precious gifts. They are in fact possessed by many and in great abundance -- and what is worse, they aren't even important qualities. Humbleness, gratefulness, kindness, affection, loyalty, warmth -- all of which I lack to any appreciable degree -- are far more desirable.
The disgusting earnestness with which people like me pursue a chimera of importance. The arrogance of feeling like I owe the world something, that I have a gift to impart and that everything must be sacrificed to it. That simple and ordinary pleasures are to be cast on the alter before the idol of my own as-yet not manifest greatness.
Occasionally, briefly, I teeter on the brink of Douglas Adam's Total Perspective Vortex, but fall back into counterfactual, self-loving oblivion before truly apprehending my own insignificance, replaceability, profound commonness. And yet how instantaneous is the self-preserving will to uniqueness that reflexively kicks in! On apprehending my own averageness, I immediately congratulate myself on my own enlightened self-awareness, and at once place myself in a better and exalted class than the average! No! Resist! All subsequent layers of introspection, including this one and beyond, have all been thought of and secretly adored as marks of distinction by the countless impotent, self-preserving wretches like me! There is no escape from the oppressive divergence between self-willed image of oneself as special and destined for great things and the universal fact that even my most rare and precious thoughts and dreams have been and will be repeated and discarded and surpassed and rejected in endless echoes of themselves in the unnumbered average minds that hum and whir in futile self-regarding unison the world over.
Nothing is easier for “ordinary” people of limited intelligence than to imagine themselves exceptional and original and to revel in that delusion without the slightest misgiving.
Gavril Ardalionovitch Ivolgin belonged to the second category. He belonged to the class of the “much cleverer” people, though he was infected from head to foot with the desire for originality. But that class, as we observed above, is far less happy than the first; for the clever “commonplace” man, even if he occasionally or even always fancies himself a man of genius and originality, yet preserves the worm of doubt gnawing at his heart, which in some cases drives the clever man to utter despair.
Dostoyefsky - The Idiot
