Short Fiction, Aleksandr Kuprin [the speed reading book txt] 📗

say that now the lilac will always be my favourite flower.⁠ ⁠…” Tempting Providence

You’re always saying “accident, accident.⁠ ⁠…” That’s just the point. What I want to say is that on every merest accident it is possible to look more deeply.

Permit me to remark that I am already sixty years old. And this is just the age when, after all the noisy passions of his youth, a man must choose one of three ways of life: moneymaking, ambition, or philosophy. For my part I think there are only two paths. Ambition must, sooner or later, take the form of getting something for oneself⁠—money or power⁠—in acquiring and extending either earthly or heavenly possibilities.

I don’t dare to call myself a philosopher, that’s too high-flown a title for me⁠ ⁠… it doesn’t go with my character. I’m the sort of person who might anytime be called upon to show his credentials. But all the same, my life has been extremely broad and very varied. I have seen riches and poverty and sickness, war and the loss of friends, prison, love, ruin, faith, unbelief. And I’ve even⁠—believe it or not, as you please⁠—I’ve even seen people. Perhaps you think that a foolish remark? But it’s not. For one man to see another and understand him, he must first of all forget his own personality, forget to consider what impression he himself is making on his neighbours and what a fine figure he cuts in the world. There are very few who can see other people, I assure you.

Well, here I am, a sinful man, and in my declining years I love to ponder upon life. I am old, and solitary as well, and you can’t think how long the nights are to us old folk. My heart and my memory have preserved for me thousands of living recollections⁠—of myself and of others. But it’s one thing to chew the cud of recollection as a cow chews nettles, and quite another to consider things with wisdom and judgment. And that’s what I call philosophy.

We’ve been talking of accident and fate. I quite agree with you that the happenings of life seem senseless, capricious, blind, aimless, simply foolish. But over them all⁠—that is, over millions of happenings interwoven together, there reigns⁠—I am perfectly certain of this⁠—an inexorable law. Everything passes and returns again, is born again out of a little thing, out of nothing, burns and tortures itself, rejoices, reaches a height and falls, and then returns again and again, as if twining itself about the spiral curve of the flight of time. And this spiral having been accomplished, it in its turn winds back again for many years, returning and passing over its former place, and then making a new curve⁠—a spiral of spirals.⁠ ⁠… And so on without end.

Of course you’ll say that if this law is really in existence people would long ago have discovered it and would be able to define its course and make a kind of map of it. No, I don’t think so. We are like weavers, sitting close up to an infinitely long and infinitely broad web. There are certain colours before our eyes, flowers, blues, purples, greens, all moving, moving and passing⁠ ⁠… but because we’re so near to it we can’t make out the pattern. Only those who are able to stand above life, higher than we do, gentle scholars, prophets, dreamers, saints and poets, these may have occasional glimpses through the confusion of life, and their keen inspired gaze may see the beginnings of a harmonious design, and may divine its end.

You think I express myself extravagantly? Don’t you now? But wait a little; perhaps I can put it more clearly. You musn’t let me bore you, though.⁠ ⁠… Yet what can one do on a railway journey except talk?

I agree that there are laws of Nature governing alike in their wisdom the courses of the stars and the digestion of beetles. I believe in such laws and I revere them. But there is Something or Somebody stronger than Fate, greater than the world. If it is Something, I should call it the law of logical absurdity, or of absurd logicality, just as you please.⁠ ⁠… I can’t express myself very well. If it is Somebody, then it must be someone in comparison with whom our biblical devil and our romantic Satan are but puny jesters and harmless rogues.

Imagine to yourself an almost godlike Power over this world, having a desperate childish love of playing tricks, knowing neither good nor evil, but always mercilessly hard, sagacious, and, devil take it all, somehow strangely just. You don’t understand, perhaps? Then let me illustrate my meaning by examples.

Take Napoleon: a marvellous life, an almost impossibly great personality, inexhaustible power, and look at his end⁠—on a tiny island, suffering from disease of the bladder, complaining of the doctors, of his food, senile grumblings in solitude.⁠ ⁠… Of course, this pitiful end was simply a mocking laugh, a derisive smile on the face of my mysterious Somebody. But consider this tragic biography thoughtfully, putting aside all the explanations of learned people⁠—they would explain it all simply in accordance with law⁠—and I don’t know how it will appear to you, but here I see clearly existing together this mixture of absurdity and logicality, and I cannot possibly explain it to myself.

Then General Skobelef. A great, a splendid figure. Desperate courage, and a kind of exaggerated belief in his own destiny. He always mocked at death, went into a murderous fire of the enemy with bravado, and courted endless risks in a kind of unappeasable thirst for danger. And see⁠—he died on a common bed, in a hired room in the company of prostitutes. Again I say: absurd, cruel, yet somehow logical. It is as if each of these pitiful deaths by their contrast with the life, rounded off, blended, completed, two splendid beings.

The ancients knew and feared this mysterious Someone⁠—you remember the ring of Polycrates⁠—but they mistook his jest for the envy of