Notes From Underground by Roger Scruton Page A

Friendship with the Soviet People!!” Strange, I reflected, that some frail old person should have taken the trouble to copy out those empty words, to etch them round with quotation marks, and to place them in this dusty shrine. I sensed the pathos of the Agitation Center: the pathos of an agitation that has dwindled to a palsy. The message of the Center was that you are not to hope or plan or strive, that everything has been fixed eternally, and that nothing remains for each successive generation but to append its signature to the senseless decree of Progress. Looking through that dirty window, I saw something for which I found words only here, in America, in a poem by T.S. Eliot, another exile from modernity: I saw ‘fear in a handful of dust’. I had lived with that fear all around me, and now I was fighting it, not on my own behalf but on behalf of my city, my country, and my friends. It scarcely seemed to matter at that moment that I had no friends, nor did I see that I was striding into solitude. But I will come to that.
    It was at the railway line beneath the Nusle Bridge that I knew I was being followed. The barrier was down at the crossing and I had to wait as a local train carrying a few huddled forms clanked through the darkness towards the river. From the corner of my eye, I noticed the figure moving quickly out of sight into a doorway. I crossed the railway and hid for a moment in the bushes that lined the path. I saw him hesitate and turn back. Then, when I began to walk, my footsteps echoed faintly below me as he resumed his pursuit. I had not seen his face, and his form was hidden beneath a heavy black coat. But there was something intimate in his way of moving, as though he already knew me.
    There was a police car parked in front of our block. I did not turn round, but I knew from his steps that my companion had suddenlyveered away, like a sparrow at the sight of a hawk. Whoever it was, therefore, he was not working for them. This thought troubled me, since it suggested that his motives were personal. And who, besides Betka, could possibly have a personal interest in me?
    The wood had splintered away from the hinges of our door, which hung from its lock at an angle. I stepped across the wreckage and pressed the light switch, but nothing happened. The dim light from the stairwell went out, and for a moment I groped in darkness among broken glass and overturned furniture, until finding the bent metal lamp that Mother kept on the table beside her bed. I pressed the little button in its base, and felt a sudden stab of grief, remembering her presence in this room, and her hand reaching out to this button, which was the last thing that happened each night at home, when she had put aside her book and settled down to sleep. She touched this little button in order to wrap the day’s troubles in a parcel of darkness, and I recalled her way of arranging our penury in neat and compact shapes, so that the trouble of our life was both controlled and stored. When the lamp came on, showing the smashed remains of her dominion, with the shards of glass from the ceiling light scattered across the upturned chairs and shelves torn down in cascades of plaster, I could not retain my tears.
    After a while, however, I began to look on the disaster in another way—a way that showed that it was not a disaster at all, but a challenge. My life underground had been possible only because everything else was predictable. Although we lived in poverty and had no worldly hopes, we had our routine. Food appeared on the table; wages were paid; Dad’s books were at hand, and Mother was busy each evening with the typewriter. I was free to invent my world, and that is what I had done, leaving Mother to pay the cost of it. Now, however, the fictions had been swept aside and another landscape appeared.
You must change your life
. Yes, and I could; because of Betka I could live in truth. That was the thought with which I