The short story by Anton Chekov called “The Bet”
is based on a wager made between a banker and a young idealistic lawyer. The
banker bets the young upstart student of jurisprudence that he could not
tolerate 5 years of solitary confinement in a prison environment. The young
idealist takes him up on his challenge, even raising the stakes to 15 years, in
an endeavour to prove his point. The banker accepts the challenge under the proviso
that he must cough up $2 million if his prisoner is able to do the time. The prisoner serves his time, spending his years
in study, devouring the classics, the New Testament, treatises on philosophy
and theology, finishing his period of confinement with the eclectic archival
tastes of a pretentious dilettante. In the end, having grown weary of the inane
struggle called existence, he decides that he no longer needs or even wants the
money. There is no longer any point in honouring the terms of the wager, as he
has an appetite for nothing this world has to offer. He leaves a note for his jailer, who at one point
he upbraids for the decadent lifestyle he has fallen into:"You are mad, and gone the wrong
way. You take falsehood for truth, and ugliness for beauty. You would marvel if
suddenly apple and orange trees should bear frogs and lizards instead of fruit,
and if roses should begin to breathe the odour of a sweating horse. So do I
marvel at you, who have bartered heaven for earth. I do not want to understand
you." Sage words iterated by a man who has lived the life of an ascetic,
renounced the world, foregone all worldly attachments, freed himself from
desire, and gained complete liberation from the cares of this world.Now apply his words to today’s bankers who control
the world and their lackeys in government, the media, academia, science and
industry. Name a single minion of the unholy alliance who has not “bartered
heaven for earth” and sold his soul to the devil, and who does not “take
falsehood for truth” in his prostituted existence. Even the arts have failed to
uphold their once high standards, seeding the field with a crop that
substitutes “ugliness for beauty,” and doling out honours to the sick, the
cynical and depraved products of the dark imagination, the works of Steven
King, Roman Polansky, Christopher Nolan and other bastions of the so-called
entertainment industry. But we are as much to blame for buying into this
fraud and participating, bartering heaven for hell in the process, and making
Lucifer our king. There is even a TV series now called Lucifer, which
those living under his spell find fit entertainment for their children. But
then it is not as if we weren’t warned in Ephesians 2:2 that he is “the prince
of the power of the air,” not to speak of the airwaves. Care to place bets that the vast majority of us
will soon barter away our freedom to live in the global security state offered
up to us by the New World Order of Lucifer? And so the chaff is separated from
the wheat, which blows as so much dust in the wind.
Dr. Anton Chekhov once said, "Medicine is my awful life, and literature is my mistress." In addition to being a seminal playwright he was also a leading writer of short stories. As a young man he began writing daily short, humorous sketches, and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, churning out 500 of them in 8 years; since he treated his poor patients for free he wrote for money. He wanted to call his 1st collection of stories "Buy This Book or I'll Smash Your Face In," but was persuaded to call it "Motley Tales" instead. At about that time, when he was 26, he was told by Dmitry Grigorovich that he should write less and concentrate on literary quality, leading the young writer to confess that "I have written my stories the way reporters write up their notes about fires – mechanically, half-consciously, caring nothing about either the reader or myself." Two years later, partly through Grigorovich's intervention, he won the Pushkin Prize "for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth." The following year, after spending 8 days on it, he wrote "Pari" ("The Bet"), which was published on 1 January 1889 as "The Fairy Tale." When the story was collected at the turn of the century he retitled and revised it, eliminating its final section in which the lawyer adopted the banker's attitude. "As I was reading the proofs, I came to dislike the end, it occurred to me that it was too cold and cruel."
ReplyDelete