書抄 #2
(…) People are bad, good, clever, stupid, pleasant and unpleasant; but superfluous… no. That’s to say, if you want to understand me: the universe could get along without such people… of course; but uselessness is not their chief quality, not their distinctive characteristic, and when you talk about them the word “superfluous” is not the first one that springs to one’s tongue. But in my case, nothing else can be said about me: I’m superfluous and that’s all there is to it. Redundant - nothing else. Nature did not count on my appearance and therefore treated me like an unexpected and unbidden guest. One joker has said of me not inappropriately, keen on cards as he was, that I was the throwaway card in my mother’s hand. I talk about myself now calmly, with no bitterness… The game’s long over! During the course of my life I constantly found my place already occupied, perhaps because I looked for it in the wrong place. I was highly strung, pitifully shy, extremely irritable, like all ill people; in addition, perhaps through excessive self-regard or generally through the unsuccessful structure of my personality, there existed between my feelings and my thoughts — and the expression of these feelings and thoughts — some senseless, incomprehensible and impregnable obstacles. And when I tried to overcome this obstacle by force, to smash this barrier, my movements, my facial expression, my whole being acquired a look of intense effort: I not only looked, but I actually became unnatural and over-wrought: I felt this myself and hastened to return to what I was. Then a frightful panic would arise in me. I used to analyse myself down to the last thread, used to compare myself with others, recalled all the smallest glances, smiles and words of those to whom I’d tried to be frank, interpreted everything in a bad light, laughed viciously at my attempts “to be like the rest” — and suddenly, in the midst of my laughing, I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again — in short, I went round and round like a squirrel on a wheel. Whole days went by in this tormenting, fruitless activity. Well, now just you tell me, to whom and for what is such a man necessary? Who knows and who will say why this happened to me, what was the cause of this nitpicking concern with myself?
I remember I was once travelling away from Moscow in a diligence. The road was good, but the driver hitched up a fifth horse to the four already in harness. This unfortunate fifth horse, completely useless, tied somehow to the shaft by a short, stout rope which mercilessly cut its haunch, rubbed its tail and forced it to run in the most unnatural fashion, lending its whole body the shape of a comma, always aroused in me profound pity. I remarked to the driver that on this occasion one could get by without a fifth horse… He said nothing, shook his head, lashed the horse ten times with his whip across its thin back and distended stomach — and muttered, not without a grin: “Look, it’s dragged itself along right enough! Devil knows why, eh?“
And I’ve dragged myself along just like that… though, thanks heavens, the post-station’s not far off now.
— Ivan Turgenev.
“The Diary of a Superfluous Man” First Love & Other Stories. Trans. Richard Freeborn. Oxford& NY: Oxford UP, 1989. pp33-34.
留言 25 Nov, 07