Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes from Underground, also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld, is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Notes is considered by many to be one of the first existentialist novels. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man), who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?The second part of the book is called "Apropos of the Wet Snow" and describes certain events that appear to be destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator and anti-hero.

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. 

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Rebecca Moraglia

Roxan

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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.

Notes from the Underground quotes

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