An Evening Guest
The lamp throws a bright circle of even light on the table at which I am sitting. Everything beyond this circle is dark, empty, lifeless; everything is strange to me, forgotten by me. The whole world is concentrated in this small space, every ink stain of which, every cut and roughness is perfectly familiar to me. I want nothing else. The sheet of paper before me is blindingly white and its edges are sharply outlined against the green cloth. The seconds of the evening run by with gentle, hasteless monotony, and in that circle of light everything is simple, bright, congenial, close, familiar, and dreamy. I want nothing, nothing else!
But somebody knocks at my door. One, two, three. … In rapid and insistent succession come three dull, disquieting knocks. The dreamy fascination of the lighted circle immediately disappears, as a picture moves away from the screen. I am again in my room, in my home in the city. … Life has rushed in upon me, just as the noises of the street rush in through an open window.
Who is there on the other side of the door? In a moment he will enter my room, I shall see his face, hear the sound of his voice, take his hand. I shall touch him with my vision and my hearing, with my body and thought. Oh, how simple is all this, yet how mysterious, incomprehensible, almost terrifying!
For there is not a single phenomenon, however trifling, that would not leave in me its indelible trace. The quiet stirring of a mouse under my floor, and an execution, the birth of a child, and the rustle of a leaf in autumn, a storm on the ocean, and the ticking of a watch, the embrace of a loved woman, and an ordinary advertisement—everything, large and small, consciously or unconsciously perceived by me, touches my brain and traces on it unintelligible lines and curves. Every instant of my life leaves an indelible, though unconscious, impress on my character—on my love or hatred of life, my mind, my health, my memory, my imagination, my future life, and, perhaps, even on the life of my children and my grandchildren. But I know neither the sequence of events, nor the time of their coming, nor their elemental force, nor their hidden meaning. …
I do not know what will happen to me tomorrow. … Only the shallow, self-satisfied, dull pharisees, or the chosen clairvoyants, with extraordinarily sensitized spirits, know it—or deceive themselves and others into a belief that they know it. I do not know what will happen to me in an hour or in a minute. I live like a player, and fate turns constantly my wheel of surprises.
Why is it that gambling excites people? Because if we stake a certain sum on the nine of spades, we cannot tell beforehand where it will fall: if to the right, we lose; if to the left, we win; because before our very eyes the future immediately becomes the past, while our hopes and plans change into disappointment or joy; because a game of cards is also life, only more contracted and intensified, like life in a jar of oxygen; because in a game of cards we feel with our souls that before us walks a dread divinity that holds sway over probabilities and possibilities.
But the phenomena of plain, ordinary life do not affect us deeply; we live in their midst blindly and indifferently. And yet, every day, every hour, whether we eat, or hasten to a tryst, or sign a business document, or sit in a theatre, or play cards, or bring a new friend to our home, or buy or sell, or sleep or stay awake—in reality we are constantly drawing
