“…this [shameful inner world] is not the Freudian world of instinct and subconscious. It is the result of the following process: in our relations with other people we want to be cultivated, superior, mature, so we use the language of maturity and we talk about, for instance, Beauty, Goodness, Truth… But within our own confidential, intimate reality, we feel nothing but inadequacy, immaturity; and then our private ideals collapse, and we create a private mythology for ourselves, which is also basically a culture, but a shabby, inferior culture, degraded to the level of our own inadequacy. This world…is composed of the remains of the official banquet: it is as though we were simultaneously at table and under the table.”
Witold Gombrowicz, on the anthropology expounded by Ferdydurke.
