Reading

I finished the first segment of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground in the past few minutes. I remember buying the book well over a decade ago but not hearing the voice at the time and letting it linger on the shelf and in various cardboard liquor boxes until now.

I remember reading Crime and Punishment immediately after ingesting the first few paragraphs in the book store. I would read it on the banks of the river, having been swept into the nightmare of the determination involved in the novel so easily. It is a younger character in that novel making it easier to identify with at the time though I have since read that Notes predates Crime and Punishment & is apparently considered a prequel to it in some circles.

Anyway, among sedentary inertia, concepts of twice two equals four (revamped so brutally by Orwell in such perverted echoes less than a hundred years later), and inflicting the moans of toothache upon the world, I find myself reaching out to an old partner in crime as I mentally underline passages of these rants:

Boris, read this fucking thing. You will relate more than you would like to.