The antithesis of the normal man is the man of acute consciousness who has come out of course, not of lap of nature but out of a retort…this retort made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis with all his exaggerated consciousness, he thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man…Apart from the one fundamental nastiness, the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it, so many other nastiness in the form of doubts and questions, adds to that one question so many unsettled questions that it inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action…Of course, the only thing left for it to do is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw and with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creeps ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking underground home, our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and ever-lasting spite.
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I am a mouse, a missy mouse and I have my ‘underground home’ to which I retrieve to escape the pragmatic world populated with successful ‘men and women of action’ for whom I feign contempt, all the while knowing that my Ma would have had so much less to worry over if I could be like them. That underground home of mine is my reverie, kaleidoscopic yet monochromatic as it is always sepia tinted! My reverie embraces me in its gossamer arms, treating me like Alice but calling me Amelie! I amble solitary on a beach on a stormy afternoon and watch with awe, the ardent romance of the ferocious wind with the picturesque but no less turbulent sea. Suddenly, I spot in a distance, across the heavy, sombre curtain of rain, a gaunt figure with dishevelled hair. I cannot see it well but I know that the figure has dreamy, melancholy eyes that are capable of narrating a thousand ballads of broken dreams and heart-break. I quicken my foot-steps so that I can reach the figure who I think is a poet, a kindred soul lost in the deserted beach like I am but the more I walk in its direction, the more distant does the figure gets. This figure never materialises in my reverie again, until one frosty winter morning, when am sitting by my favourite casement in the ancient public library of my sleepy little hill station and I-again suddenly-spot the same figure, gaunt and dreamy, walk past the mountainous path right under my window. By now, I only know it to well to expect anything from it. Thus, I, the missy mouse, sitting in my mouse hole, travel from mountains to beaches and back to my hole. “The longer you stay in there, the more enfeebled you will be.” They tell me, nodding their heads with concern. I know I should but some how i dont want to. I have reasons for my unwillingness-unlike Dostoyevsky’s 19th century mouse’s hole, mine does not stink. In it wafts the fragrance of the dreams I dreamt of the House of Usher last night and of radical revolutions against parochialism and injustice i read up about. Do i have to venture out of the hole to be able to contribute in them? Well, this is what cant figure out.
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