Intelligent young brooders are found in literature throughout the ages, perhaps because many authors themselves were brooding young intellectuals. Shakespeare's Hamlet and Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov both grappled with the purpose of their existence, the nature of man, and a murder they felt compelled to commit and yet could not embolden themselves to carry out. The passage from which the above quote was taken reveals their common displeasure for life caused by a surfeit of fevered words and thoughts and a deficit of reality and resolution.

Although there were different circumstances leading to each of their existentialist funks, their dilemmas were essentially the same. Faced with deep personal crises, they lost interest in their old pastimes and became absorbed in deep and furious thought. Both felt strongly about the potential of man (or at least, in Raskolnikov's case, of the extraordinary man) to act in wondrous and powerful ways, and at least in the abstract felt themselves capable of the same; yet both spent a long time paralyzed in indecision. Hamlet spoke for Raskolnikov when he contrasted man's great idealism and potential with the stark harshness of the actual world around him.

Reason dictates that man, being a carbon based life form lasting seventy or eighty years, is no more important in the long run than dust; the idealistic fool that man is, however, insists on aspiring for -- and often acquiring -- great things. Mired in mud and darkness, man yet feels the insistent tug of the stars; but the more clearly a person sees the stars, the more clearly also the surrounding landscape appears desolate, humanity's efforts to conquer it futile.

It seems a common assumption that an intelligent person, knowing so much more than the average individual, would be that much better equipped to handle personal problems; yet the opposite is true. A mind that grasps simple problems easily also sees the more complex ones in terrifying detail, and has answers to neither. Whereas a person of average intellect might think about killing a rich old woman to get her money, only a "superior" intellect would also see the action in the framework of a larger human history and of the moral imperatives of greatness. An ordinary man does not dare to place himself on par with great ones, nor does he consider his actions to have much significance to humanity as a whole; an extraordinary man both expects great things of himself and sees great import for humanity at large.

Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky differed, however, on how their young intellects resolved their wrestling with life and meaning. Raskolnikov finally willed himself up to murder the old pawnbroker, and discovered that he had been wrong; the theory that had fed feverishly on philosophy and thoughts and words met was placed in the balance with reality and found badly wanting. The young Russian, then forced to lead a life of less thought and more living, eventually came to appreciate the same "quintessence of dust" that he and Hamlet had both lamented.

Shakespeare's world was harsher and more unforgiving than Dostoyevsky's; for Hamlet, the long and consuming contemplations of revenge eventually also consumed his life. For all the bleakness of nineteenth century Russia, the troubled young student could yet have another shot at life; whereas the young Danish prince, tormented by the madness of the world and unable to devise a method to deal with it, was cast aside for being capable neither of ignoring nor of resolving the great questions of life and its absurdity.