There’s this quote by Fydor Dostoyevsky (I’ve read a few of his words in my World Lit class) and I just want to talk about it, I feel like talking about it would be good for me.
So, the quote goes:
“‘I exist.’ In thousands of agonies- I exist. I’m tortured on the rack -but I exist! Although I sit alone- I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, knowing the sun is there.'”
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
When I read that for class, it made me think about how sometimes people feel alone even in a room full of people. Maybe that’s just a quote from Tumblr, I know I lived, breathed, inhaled fake deep quotes from Tumblr back in 2013, but I often think about how true that people do feel like that. Because sometimes, even now I feel that way too.
Sometimes, when my words get too jumbled up in my head, and no matter how many times I cry, scream, or even attempt to explain what I’m possibly thinking about in my head to my friends or family, I feel like they will never quite understand what I’m trying to say, what kind of sentence or paragraph or even book I’m trying to decipher to them. How, at the end of the day, although I go through all this agony and loneliness, even though I attempt to talk about how I feel, how even though there are glorious amounts of people that care and surround me- why do I still feel alone?
And I hate feeling like that.
I hate feeling like the quiet and the loneliness is taking over when I try again and again to get away, to just breathe and read a page one step at a time, but in the end, my heart starts pumping loudly against my ears before I know it, and my breath gets shaky, and the quiet and the anxiety will never ever let me be free.
I almost seem to never get away from it.
Then, there’s that weird part of my brain that tells me that I’m not alone. And I know it. I have evidence of it. I have pictures of myself smiling and having fun with people that care about me, and I know they care about me. So why does loneliness seem to thaw away at any event that I’m in?
That quote makes me think about you can just open up your window and scream out into the night sky and as your screams echo throughout the city and come back to you, you get this sort of eerie silence. Because you know that there are other people living as well. They’re in front of you, but they never responded.
I have to remind myself that in a thousand agonies, I do exist. And there is life outside with people even if they don’t respond, even if they don’t understand what I’m trying to say. Just as Dostoyevsky said. There is a beauty in knowing that the sun is there. And I do. The sun will always be there, coming up for a new day even when the night and darkness falls upon me for many nights. The sun will rise.
Dostoyevsky said, “In thousands of agonies- I exist.”
And I do. I do exist. I feel real. Even at nights when I don’t.
You exist as well. We are all living in our thousands of agonies, we are all existing.
This is my own version of agonies.
In a thousand words, I exist.
In a thousand words, I’m trying to exist.
In a thousand words, I am alive.
I really like my world lit class, I get introduced to various writers that I haven’t ever read works from. I used to think that I don’t like old Victorian-era writing, but it is marvelous. There is a beauty in marvelous things.
This is a old post from my old blog so I decided why not move my thoughts here :,)
I hope everyone is well! Stay safe.
Jan.
januisance 