Lights Page #11

"Lives" is a poignant short story by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov that explores the complexities of human emotion and relationships. Set against the backdrop of ordinary life, the narrative delves into the introspections of its characters, revealing their innermost thoughts and struggles. Chekhov masterfully employs his signature style, blending subtle humor with deep pathos, as he examines themes of love, loss, and the fleeting nature of happiness. The story invites readers to reflect on the intricacies of human connections and the quiet moments that define our existence.

								


"'Surely I am not in love?' I asked myself, scratching my hand.

"Only as night came on when the passengers were asleep and I was left
tête-à-tête with my conscience, I began to understand what I had not
been able to grasp before. In the twilight of the railway carriage the
image of Kisotchka rose before me, haunted me and I recognised clearly
that I had committed a crime as bad as murder. My conscience tormented
me. To stifle this unbearable feeling, I assured myself that everything
was nonsense and vanity, that Kisotchka and I would die and decay, that
her grief was nothing in comparison with death, and so on and so on . .
. and that if you come to that, there is no such thing as freewill, and
that therefore I was not to blame. But all these arguments only
irritated me and were extraordinarily quickly crowded out by other
thoughts. There was a miserable feeling in the hand that Kisotchka had
kissed. . . . I kept lying down and getting up again, drank vodka at the
stations, forced myself to eat bread and butter, fell to assuring myself
again that life had no meaning, but nothing was of any use. A strange
and if you like absurd ferment was going on in my brain. The most
incongruous ideas crowded one after another in disorder, getting more
and more tangled, thwarting each other, and I, the thinker, 'with my
brow bent on the earth,' could make out nothing and could not find my
bearings in this mass of essential and non-essential ideas. It appeared
that I, the thinker, had not mastered the technique of thinking, and
that I was no more capable of managing my own brain than mending a
watch. For the first time in my life I was really thinking eagerly and
intensely, and that seemed to me so monstrous that I said to myself: 'I
am going off my head.' A man whose brain does not work at all times, but
only at painful moments, is often haunted by the thought of madness.

"I spent a day and a night in this misery, then a second night, and
learning from experience how little my philosophy was to me, I came to
my senses and realised at last what sort of a creature I was. I saw that
my ideas were not worth a brass farthing, and that before meeting
Kisotchka I had not begun to think and had not even a conception of what
thinking in earnest meant; now through suffering I realised that I had
neither convictions nor a definite moral standard, nor heart, nor
reason; my whole intellectual and moral wealth consisted of specialist
knowledge, fragments, useless memories, other people's ideas--and nothing
else; and my mental processes were as lacking in complexity, as useless
and as rudimentary as a Yakut's. . . . If I had disliked lying, had not
stolen, had not murdered, and, in fact, made obviously gross mistakes,
that was not owing to my convictions--I had none, but because I was in
bondage, hand and foot, to my nurse's fairy tales and to copy-book
morals, which had entered into my flesh and blood and without my
noticing it guided me in life, though I looked on them as absurd. . . .

"I realised that I was not a thinker, not a philosopher, but simply a
dilettante. God had given me a strong healthy Russian brain with promise
of talent. And, only fancy, here was that brain at twenty-six,
undisciplined, completely free from principles, not weighed down by any
stores of knowledge, but only lightly sprinkled with information of a
sort in the engineering line; it was young and had a physiological
craving for exercise, it was on the look-out for it, when all at once
quite casually the fine juicy idea of the aimlessness of life and the
darkness beyond the tomb descends upon it. It greedily sucks it in, puts
its whole outlook at its disposal and begins playing with it, like a cat
with a mouse. There is neither learning nor system in the brain, but
that does not matter. It deals with the great ideas with its own innate
powers, like a self-educated man, and before a month has passed the
owner of the brain can turn a potato into a hundred dainty dishes, and
fancies himself a philosopher . . . .

"Our generation has carried this dilettantism, this playing with serious
ideas into science, into literature, into politics, and into everything
which it is not too lazy to go into, and with its dilettantism has
introduced, too, its coldness, its boredom, and its one-sidedness and,
as it seems to me, it has already succeeded in developing in the masses
a new hitherto non-existent attitude to serious ideas.

"I realised and appreciated my abnormality and utter ignorance, thanks
to a misfortune. My normal thinking, so it seems to me now, dates from
the day when I began again from the A, B, C, when my conscience sent me
flying back to N., when with no philosophical subleties I repented,
besought Kisotchka's forgiveness like a naughty boy and wept with her. .
. ."

Ananyev briefly described his last interview with Kisotchka.

"H'm. . . ." the student filtered through his teeth when the engineer
had finished. "That's the sort of thing that happens."

His face still expressed mental inertia, and apparently Ananyev's story
had not touched him in the least. Only when the engineer after a
moment's pause, began expounding his view again and repeating what he
had said at first, the student frowned irritably, got up from the table
and walked away to his bed. He made his bed and began undressing.

"You look as though you have really convinced some one this time," he
said irritably.

"Me convince anybody!" said the engineer. "My dear soul, do you suppose
I claim to do that? God bless you! To convince you is impossible. You
can reach conviction only by way of personal experience and suffering!"

"And then--it's queer logic!" grumbled the student as he put on his
nightshirt. "The ideas which you so dislike, which are so ruinous for
the young are, according to you, the normal thing for the old; it's as
though it were a question of grey hairs. . . . Where do the old get this
privilege? What is it based upon? If these ideas are poison, they are
equally poisonous for all?"

"Oh, no, my dear soul, don't say so!" said the engineer with a sly wink.
"Don't say so. In the first place, old men are not dilettanti. Their
pessimism comes to them not casually from outside, but from the depths
of their own brains, and only after they have exhaustively studied the
Hegels and Kants of all sorts, have suffered, have made no end of
mistakes, in fact--when they have climbed the whole ladder from bottom to
top. Their pessimism has both personal experience and sound philosophic
training behind it. Secondly, the pessimism of old thinkers does not
take the form of idle talk, as it does with you and me, but of
Weltschmertz, of suffering; it rests in them on a Christian foundation
because it is derived from love for humanity and from thoughts about
humanity, and is entirely free from the egoism which is noticeable in
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