I want to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not, why I could not even become an insect. I tell you solemnly that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be conscious is an illness—a real thoroughgoing illness. For man’s everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness; that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy Nineteenth Century, especially one who has the fatal ill luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the terrestrial globe.

From Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, translated by Constance Garnett, Dublin: Roads, 2013 (first published in 1864), p. 13.