The Russians Keep Coming, The Russians Keep Coming

May 19, 2015
The Russians Keep Coming, The Russians Keep Coming

               We're not a curious species, whatever we'd like to think of ourselves. At least we're not truly
                curious. We follow our curiosity until it has led us somewhere near where we wanted to go -
                but no further. - Uncle Albert

Chekhov. (See here.) Now Gogol. Ah, Dead Souls: I’m reading around in Part 2. Chcihikov is dancing like a ping-pong ball from mismanaged estate to mismanaged estate, every landowner a caricature of himself. How closer can anyone write to real life?

Shine on, Shine on, Nikolai up in the sky.

I think: “By the time we are my age – over sixty (barely!) – we are all caricatures of ourselves.” As if that hadn’t happened much sooner, as if at fifteen we were not caricatures of ourselves at fifteen, at twenty-five caricatures of ourselves at twenty-five, and so thirty, and thirty-five, and forty, and forty-five, and so on – always caricatures of ourselves.

          We are always more than, yet never more than, the role we are playing, even when we are alone, when we ourselves are our only audience. We narrate, we posture; we deliver grand soliloquies, we whisper revealing asides. We enter, but we never exit. We are the constant objects of our own wonder and disappointment.  We hiss and cheer ourselves on. We are our own grand melodrama, if only acted by poor traveling players in a series of small-town high school auditoriums. So, now we tie ourselves to the track, now we scream in mock horror – we hear the chuffing of the train bearing down on us. Now we ride in to save the day.

And, now we tie ourselves to the track, now we scream, now . . . .