… For we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it.  Why, we have come almost to looking at real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books.  And why do we fuss and fume sometime? Why are we perverse and ask for something else?  We don’t know what ourselves. It would be worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered.  Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres  of our activity, relax the control, and we… yes I assure you…we should beg to be  under control again at once.  I know you will very likely be angry at me for that, and will begin shouting and stamping.  Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your miseries in your underground holes, and don’t dare say to all of us-excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that “all of us.”  As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what’s more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourself.  So that, perhaps after all, there is more life in me than in you.  Look into it more carefully!  Why, we don’t even know what living means now, what it is and what it is called!  Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once.  We shall not know what to join onto, what to cling to what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise.  We are oppressed at being men-men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.  We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better.  We are developing a taste for it.  Soon we shall contrive to born somehow from an idea…

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Notes From the Underground)