I recently started reading Richard Flanagan's so-far radiant book Question 7. I read the following passage at lunch today and it should be shared, so here it is:
Chekhov believed that the role of literature was not to provide answers but only to ask the necessary questions. One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical:
Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?'
Who loves longer? Though written for money at the very start of his career, question 7 is in many ways the archetypal Chekhov story in just two sentences. Like so much of what Chekhov wrote, question 7 is about how the world from which we presume to derive meaning and purpose is not the true world. It is a surface world, a superficial world, a frozen world of appearances, beneath which an entirely different world surges as if a wild river that at any moment might drown us. A woman ignored at dinner tables, a chorus girl betrayed, a man who deludes himself he is happier in the country, a womaniser who pretends to himself that he is not falling in love, a grieving cab man who tries to tell each of his fares his son has just died only to be ignored, and who ends up finding the only one who has time to listen is his horse; so much falsity beneath which we discover only in the last paragraphs, or sometimes even the last sentence, the truth of these people and through them of life itself.
Perhaps the only reply that can be made to Hiroshima is to ask question 7. If it is a question that can never be answered, it is still the question we must keep asking, if only in order to understand that life is never binary, nor reducible to cant or code, but a mystery we at best apprehend. In Chekhov’s stories, the only fools are those with answers.