Somewhere, but not here

"Closing time, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here."

My students and I ran into a log-jam yesterday trying to decipher Dostoevsky's paradoxical man is condemned to creativity rant in Part 1, chapter 9 of Notes from Underground. He claims that we all want to go "somewhere, but not here." It is our deeply rooted need to go that drives our creativity and our inability to define where that condemns us. We must graduate high school to get to college to get to the job to get to the house to get to the family to get to retirement to get to death. Whew. So what, you're saying. I can define my world. I know my destination(s). And I hear you loud and clear, gentle reader. But in many tries, my students could not, and I was not daring enough to attempt it myself. Our hopeless conclusion was that the Underground Man was right yet again, and that we did not like it.

Where to go from here? Does it matter, so long as we have some defined thing to live for? Surely that is a void not yet filled by Fyodor's mad ranter. I love my family. I will go where they go, and you can keep the creativity. Is that cheating? Surely that's too simple. Probably that's the point. If Dostoevsky's target audience was his new "modern man" and these men were too sophisticated for their own good, quibbling over politics, reinventing religion, casting down tradition, then perhaps a return to the simple is the best medicine. If I had to be honest, then I would like to be considered modern and sophisticated. But if I had to be very honest, I don't really care at all about that. How can one have such a love affair with abstraction?