Name: Notes from the Underground
ISBN: 9781434457394

Frank J. Morlock

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Based on the 1864 novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground features a highly charged encounter between the nameless narrator (the "Underground Man") and a prostitute named Lisa. A classic portrayal of the underbelly of Russian (and modern) society.

A Play in Two Acts

Notes from the Underground

Abhishek Singh

 Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind. 

jana 

Rebecca Moraglia

Roxan

Mike and his team have created a cultural zeitgeist with a loyal fan base through creative and comedic campaigns that rival SNL. They’ve leveraged social like no one else I’ve ever seen. Liquid Death is #1 most followed beverage brand on TikTok in the U.S., and their content has earned more than 21 billion media impressions in the past year with 2x the engagement of Red Bull, who previously held the crown

For our everyday sake, let’s call it heartfelt intensity. ‍

6. Put most simply, heartfelt intensity is a variety of intrinsic motivation. Not the thing a person is motivated to do but the drive underneath it all that makes them tick, so potent it puts a bit of magic behind the eyes. ‍

7. It is often more innate than taught. Not everyone you meet has got it and that’s perfectly alright, but we look for those people in which it’s undeniable.‍

8. To give a real-life example, so many of you talk about that irreplaceable ‘spirit’ with which your colleagues approach their work, particularly the ‘‘thoroughness’ and ‘thoughtfulness’ of it. And how it plays out in their attention to detail (not so much when the details are immaterial but when there’s joy to be had in them.) 

‍That thing that compels you all to obsess over the details others overlook, and do it with gusto —  that’s heartfelt intensity. 

 For us, for once, I think the answer is actually very prescriptive. Before you take on anything, you pause and ask what could be?

Create the space needed to break apart that everydayness and press on it for a while. Really press on it. Go on and dream a bit. Or as Toni Morrison says it “Dream, then think.” 

And go to different places with your dreaming. Pull from elsewhere, the objective being to bring a sense of multidimensionality to what we do and how we do it.

In some ways, asking what could be is a mindset. 

David Foster Wallace encapsulates it as well as any: “a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded."

All of it predicated on the notion that just because something is, doesn’t mean it has to be and certainly doesn’t mean it’s right.

Try no, that will be good and you qill find epace

And that’s the liberating part, especially when it comes to our work. There are no right answers of where to go out of the gate because the real art is ‘course correcting’ along the way.

Think about it like this: “there are no mistakes, only new paths to explore.

I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness – a real, thoroughgoing illness.

It was as though it were my most normal condition, and not in the least desease or depravity, so that at last all desire in me to struggle against this depravity passed. It ended by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition.

I want now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not, why I could not even become an insect. I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect.

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?

I invented adventures for myself and made up a life, so as at least to live in some way.

I should have snatched at every opportunity to drop a tear into my glass and then to drain it to all that is “good and beautiful." I should then have turned everything into the good and the beautiful; in the nastiest, unquestionable trash, I should have sought out the good and the beautiful.

You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses.

The road almost always does lead somewhere, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it.

I swear to you, gentlemen, there is not one thing, not one word of what I have written that I really believe.

At that time I was only twenty-four. My life was even then gloomy, ill-regulated, and as solitary as that of a savage. I made friends with no one and positively avoided talking, and buried myself more and more in my hole.

There was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. "I am alone and they are 

As a rule, I was always alone. In the first place I spent most of my time at home, reading. I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by means of external impressions.

Notes from the Underground A Play in Two Acts

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