by Chekhov
A couple of weeks ago, I read The Bet by the great writer Anton Chekhov. Since then, I have been thinking about it daily. It’s the way he uses his characters as metaphors and analogies without directly telling us what they mean. He doesn’t guide us to a conclusion but lets us make our own opinion of what this story means.
He tells us about a Lawyer and a Banker: one believes that imprisonment is better, and the latter that execution is better. To prove his point, the Lawyer decides to live in isolation for 15 years. By the end of those 15 years, the Lawyer tells the Banker: “Everything is loud, frail, visionary, and delusive as a mirage. Though you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death wipe you from the face of the earth like the mice underground; and your posterity, your history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen as slag, burnt down together with the terrestrial globe.”
He also reminds the Banker to “Consider the lives led once by others, long ago, the lives to be led by others after you, the lives led even now, in foreign lands. How many people don’t even know your name? How many will soon have forgotten it? How many offer you praise now—and tomorrow, perhaps, contempt. That to be remembered is worthless. Like fame. Like everything.”
These quotes reminded me of one by Marcus Aurelius, which carries a similar idea where he warns us to “Remember how fast things pass and are gone — those that are now and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the ‘what’ is in constant flux, the ‘why’ has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us—a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.”
I take this short story as a cautionary tale: a reminder to myself not to seek my path in life for the wrong reasons, may that be fame, money, status, etc., because none of those things last. None of those things really matter.
Anya Idelsen 