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

lots out of the colossal urn that life presents to us at each step. After all, in a game of cards there are only two chances: you either win or lose; while life has millions of chances, multiplied by other millions, and no tickets are blank. In a game of cards, when it is over, you pay in money immediately, while life has countless methods and dates of payment. Sometimes it pays with the miserliness of a moneylender, and sometimes with the extravagance of a man who has just come into a large fortune; sometimes its payment is open, like that of a charitable benefactor, and sometimes it is secret, like that of the Biblical widow; sometimes it pays with the suddenness and rapidity of a revolver shot, and sometimes with the slowness of an incurable disease.⁠ ⁠…

All this is inexplicable, mysterious, and, thanks to its simplicity, really dreadful. Imagine some tyrant, a real human tyrant, a madman endowed with genius, who becomes weary of the ordinary forms of enjoying his unlimited power, and hits upon the idea of introducing in his kingdom an annual lottery of life. On a certain hour of the appointed day, the soldiers would drive all the people to a public square, in the centre of which would stand an enormous vase filled with cards, definitely stating in detail the life of each person for the coming year. Everything that human ingenuity can devise is stated on some of these cards: wealth, fame, power, disgrace, imprisonment, love, suicide, honors, exile, war, labor, titles, torture, capital punishment.⁠ ⁠… Now try to imagine yourself awaiting your turn in a crowd of the unfortunate subjects of this exquisite tyrant. Oh, how your face would suddenly turn pale, how your knees would begin to shake; when you would be led to the fatal urn, how painfully your heart would beat with two diametrically opposed, yet equally potent, desires⁠—to hasten and to postpone the moment of your choice!⁠ ⁠…

And yet, we draw lots every day; only through blindness, superstition, cowardice, or plain habit, we never notice this, do not want to notice, do not think about it or believe in it. A man says: “I will order my life in such a way.” Another says: “I know that a year or two, or ten years from now, I shall still be sitting in this chair, signing papers.” Still another man is more certain of the fact that until his very death he will not leave the walls of his asylum than he is of the fact of his very existence.⁠ ⁠… And if their confidence will not deceive them, these self-satisfied men will say to themselves or to their children, or to their friends: “Now, you see, I wanted to get those honors, and I got them. Persistence and labor will bring you anything you desire. Every man forges his own happiness.” But their words are just as foolish and naive as the words of the man who says, in order to prove his independence of fate, “Now I will strike the table with my finger,” and does strike. And the former think even more foolishly than the latter, because their foolishness is more complicated and intricate.

For, in the first place, once a man becomes petrified in any one definite and final form, he enters upon the first symptomatic phase of death, for life consists in constant motion. In the second place, if we could show him, as he is today, his soul of that time, he would be astonished and would not believe that the soul is really his, and if he would believe it, he would be at a loss to explain those influences and concatenations through which it could have undergone such amazing changes. And in the third place, this man, who recognizes not the soul, but merely the filament that envelops it, will never understand that the most important phenomena of life⁠—birth, love, and death⁠—evidently for the purpose of striking us with terror, are subjected to the uncertitude of chance.

Who of us knows the meaning and the cause of our appearance in the world? Surely, our parents know least about it. In the conception and the birth of a child, in the formation of its soul and its body, and therefore in the determination of its whole future life, thousands of causes play an equally important part. The dinner eaten during the day, the odor of flowers in the garden, the fragmentary tune implanted in the conscious memory⁠—all these are possible factors, and there are thousands upon thousands of others. And the simplest and, apparently, least important of them, which remains unnoticed and totally forgotten, may prove to be the most important and potent cause.

It is the same in love. Who can tell when, where, and how we shall become enthralled by its power, beautiful, destructive, or disgusting? One can never know beforehand either one’s wife or one’s lover. A friend introduces me to some of his friends; while there, I meet others; through these, I meet a woman hitherto totally unknown to me. And when I am introduced to her, I do not know that at that moment I drew a ticket out of the urn of fate, upon which is written the following: “You are destined to eat at the same table with this woman for many years to come, to sleep next to her, to have children with her, to be called her husband.” And how many times does it happen that two men, who are longing for years for an opportunity to meet, pass each other in the street, even touch elbows, and separate once more, perhaps never to meet again!

And the children! Have I ever thought of them before? Can I tell even approximately what part of my body, my mind, and my soul I shall transmit to them? And not mine alone; but those of my father and grandfather and great-grandfather. Can I foresee all the occurrences, scarcely noticeable to me, but capable of