Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously – as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.
Every human position has a problem with it. Believed in too much, it slides into error. It’s not that no position is correct; it’s that no position is correct for long. We’re perpetually slipping out of absolute virtue and failing to notice, blinded by our desire to settle in – to finally stop fretting about things and relax forever and just be correct; to find an agenda and stick with it.
And that, by extrapolation, every person in the world has his or her inner orchestra, and the instruments present in their orchestras are, roughly speaking, the same as the ones in ours. And this is why literature works.
These days, it’s easy to feel that we’ve fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love. I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection.
No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.
Soon it becomes clear that we are not, after all, in control, not a high-functioning sailor standing stably on a nice calm deck, a deck that we have created through our virtue. The ship is pitching, and the deck is covered in ice, and we’re wearing special headphones that distort what our crewmates are shouting and special mouthpieces that distort what we’re shouting back in return.
I teach “The Singers” to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we’ll turn out to be.
It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too – it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.
In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.
We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer’s goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.
Reconsideration is hard; it takes courage. We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being the same person, one who arrived at an answer some time ago and has never had any reason to doubt it.
The secret of boring people,” Chekhov said, “lies in telling them everything.
How can Janet know she’s not being her best self if someone doesn’t tell her, then right away afterwards harshly discipline her?
They brought the first guy back and the two old hippies sat side by side, seemingly wary of each other. She felt that each, in his mind, was making the case for being the more intelligent and authentic washed-up former hippie.
Was he some kind of worrywart? It worried him.
In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world.
I just want to say that history, when it arrives, may not look as you expect, based on the reading of history books. Things in there are always so clear. One knows exactly what one would have done.
How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?
You were a joy, he said. Please know that. Know that you were a joy. To us. Every minute, every season, you were a – you did a good job. A good job of being a pleasure to know.
It was always falling down around you, everything has always been falling down around us. Only we were too alive to notice.