Life is Pitiless

Holding onto childish things

I am a man of cultivation; I have studied various remarkable books, but I cannot fathom the direction of my preferences; do I want to live or do I want to shoot myself, so to speak? But in order to be ready for all contingencies, I always carry a revolver in my pocket.

i.

The walls of the nursery are covered in translucent patterned fabric. The light filters through. I am watching The Cherry Orchard for the first time in a theater whose audience is mostly 70-plus. I am a whippersnapper at 57.

We have all paid for the privilege of watching a world end.

We are all Madame Ranevskaya.

I have never seen or read a play by Chekhov. He is a placeholder for an overworn quote: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” I used to have a joke: “My father taught me, ‘Never pull a gun unless you are ready to kill a man.’” It was my wry way of saying my father’s advice did not underpin the system of my life. I prefer Chekhov’s formulation.

A gun would be final, resolved, maybe even tragic. But The Cherry Orchard won’t be the scene of fireworks. Instead it is a nursery filled with earnest characters playing exhausted roles, hoping for connection. But love requires hope and hope requires belief. And in the fading world of the Romanovs, belief is quaint. There will be no resolution because it has lost the details that made it make sense.

We are watching a play from the turn of another century, watching an ensemble of individuals of insecure caste fail to launch. This crew is lost in this world, because fitting in requires a world with enough logic and form that we can recognize our place within it.

It is an exquisite pain to watch. Particularly Varya and Lopakhin, whose non-engagement scene near the end of the play is so awkward it is clinical. Two adults, alone, granted every social permission to speak, and they talk about the weather like clumsy adolescents. All of the romance of a four-year-old trying to snap a Lego together with a Cheerio.

The estate is a graveyard of mismatched desires—failed couplings that don’t even have the dignity of being tragic. This is the parallel play of perpetual childhood.

Chekhov was a realist in method but not in sensibility. The Cherry Orchard is brutal, but not austere; the estate hums with immanent, more‑than‑human significance, closer to Romantic nature or eco‑spiritual ground than to a neutral backdrop. It is a place. It is a thing that will die.

In a Romantic world, the characters would be of that place, in a mystic sense, one in being. The orchard would be their ground, not a token. But the children of Chekhov’s orchard are its occupants, not its offspring. Titles are granted, one is the valet or the lord, the ingenue or the sot. There is no authentic self being suppressed. There are rules to be obeyed, and we are dependent on the rules that adopt us.

And I use “children” deliberately. When identity is an articulation of society, there is no maturity; assignment substitutes for becoming. The structure of society binds us to roles while we remain fourteen. Perhaps too old to play with dolls. But still close enough to want to. Part of the pain is watching characters who can no longer honestly belong to a place that is still staged as if belonging were possible. The curtain has closed and the stage manager is tapping her watch. It is awkward.

Chekhov sees roles as playtime, and society as this armature extended preposterously. Maybe it is the nature of drama to see everything as roles and seeming, but society may code us in situ, defining the moves we are allowed to make across the board. The implication is unsettling — that the social form realizes the psychological form, that there is no essential self under the crinoline.

Lopakhin is the closest thing to a functional adult in the play and even his triumph has the weight of a round of “capture the flag,” empty, childlike.

ii

“Once upon a time.” Today.

We are here again, in a world that is collapsing. We don’t mourn a Cherry Orchard like Ranevskaya, but the white bandstand of the American town square is empty, and a family bent over their hands at a dinner table is more likely on Instagram than sharing a prayer. It feels like more than the ache of remembrance. We are all here, but we haven’t a clue.

We are obsessed with the ‘punctuation’ of history, its collapses and revolts, because they are particular, and are less inclined to the slow, local decay.

My father seemed to be born, grow up, grow old and die in a world that was completely legible, almost purpose built for him. There is something classic and eternal about a white, Ivy-educated male coming of age in the 50s. Nothing nuanced, just high-resolution destiny. Yet in the end, he became MAGA, raging his fists at the injustice and indignity meted against him. The perfect role, and yet he sensed the betrayal of norms.

We, like Chekhov, are witnesses to collapse.

There are doubtless points of punctuation, where empires fall or heads roll, as well as localized, private collapse, like the death of a downtown or the retreat of a river. I recall reading that once half of a town on the southern coast of Britain broke off into the sea. The speed of illegibility varies.

My father may have lived in a pocket of unusual legibility — postwar America, a particular class position, a particular geography — that was always somewhat artificial and always time-limited. The exception, not the rule. Most of human history has been closer to the nursery waiting for the removal truck.

There are bigger and smaller apocalypses. Legibility is always a cope.

iii

Russian society in 1900 was exhausted. As Firs, the loyal, senile servant claims, “The peasants minded the masters, and the masters minded the peasants, but now it’s all higgledy-piggledy.” Even with the liberation of the serfs, the emergence of a bourgeoisie, and the impending end of the Romanovs, it was probably still possible for Chekhov’s audience to choose pretense or imagine escape. For those ascending, it must have felt like magic. The brotherhood of man or the tug of industrial capitalism were brave and they were as new and inevitable as AI is to us.

But the aging, perplexed bystanders, the Ranevskaya, Ghayev and Firs who cannot see, are not artifacts or Victorian tropes. They are us: Confused, constructed by their past, and illegible to the future.

Can we see better than they? What technologists call the singularity is by definition beyond experience. We blithely approach our own irrelevance, presuming that our jobs and our position – even this very act of writing – matter. But we are likely blind and bound. A server farm can debate virtue ethics. And do we care?

A class has arisen that, like Lopakhin, has the answer, the mystical universal skeleton key of transactionality. See how they beam with pride as they fire torrents of satellites into space or dream of solving society’s ills by baking it in the heat waste of server farms.

But they are as neutered in their ketamine-fueled haze as Lopakhin. They destroy that which is no longer relevant and lay out yet another Brave New World, forgetting that what they laid waste to was also once new, and once brave. Our Lopakhins are also enthusiastically destructive.

And they are children, frantically hodgepodging a rationale for society from misinterpreted philosophy, eugenics, scripture and beat poetry.

Come and look at Ermolai Lopakhin laying his axe to the cherry orchard, come and look at the trees falling!

We are not the decadent remains of autocracy. We are enlightened. We can’t be Ranevskaya. Shit.

Who will redeem us? The scholar? The nauseating child?

The grace isn’t on stage. The scholar is ineffectual and the child is insufferable and the redeemer doesn’t show up because Chekhov already knew that was a lie the older forms told. The priest doesn’t come. The revolution won’t save anyone in the room.

Realization will have to suffice.

Innocence is not purity or not-yet-knowing, but a kind of permanent unpreparedness for the scale of things. We are not equipped for time.

iv.

If there is any grace available to us, it may lie not in changing the play but in how we watch it.

Seeing is the most honest act because it requires us to shut down all of our systems of repair and rationalization, all of the habits of recovery that make us want to return things to rights, putting the toys back on the shelf the way they are supposed to go. To see is to still the urge for return. The world is. Our friends are. We are.

When our son was young, he loved Legos. We rented a house for a bit with a huge kids’ bedroom and the Legos were scattered everywhere, simultaneously an invitation to create and a minefield for bare feet. When we prepared to move, I bought a set of containers and spent hours organizing the pieces, wings in this drawer, wheels in another. We brought the containers to our new house and I laid them proudly in his new room. He never touched them again.

We confuse order for attention.

In AA, there is a rule of no crosstalk—an inheritance from the Quakers. You bear witness honestly and allow others to do so without retort. It is a powerful rite of seeing, even if it is just another rule.

Even though we commit to honesty, it takes genuine effort to be and not inhabit.

v.

We say that Ranevskaya “lacks agency,” and we share Lopakhin’s deep frustration that she won’t make the “natural” choice to demolish the estate and invest in the future. But this is a modern unkindness. Agency isn’t suppressed in the play — it was never independently generated in the first place. It was always downstream of context, of a functioning social grammar that told you what moves meant and therefore what moves were worth making.

A bishop is granted relentless power by the rules of chess. On a backgammon board he is nothing.

Society is life’s grammar — shareable, legible, predictable. It makes the pairing of Varya and Lopakhin seem self-evident. But grammar is always a simplification, telling us how to behave. Reality appreciates coherence but it loves time; it wants us to become. These are tectonic plates dragging against each other, accumulating energy. The more rigidly society holds, the louder the snap when reality reasserts itself.

Nobody is amused when you try to play whist at their bridge table.

We want Ranevskaya to show some “pluck,” but that presumes that there is a self that exists independently of structure. This is probably not true either for her or for us. The question is whether you can be present within the structure rather than simply executing it. That’s a different and more achievable thing. Not authenticity in the romantic sense, but presence.

We are domesticated animals with no memory of our wilder bits.

We should not really expect Ranevskaya to change, but would it be too much to ask for her to pay attention?

vi.

Form promises stability. Every social grammar is a provisional agreement that we will act as though the rules are natural, and the agreement works until it doesn’t. Our domestication is perpetual adolescence; a wager that we will reach our end before that myth of society exhausts its contradictions.

Form is ironic. I will refuse to leave the theater until Yepikhodov fires his damn gun.

I have a wry observation that I occasionally make with friends when we are in a beautiful place, perhaps the Bolinas Lagoon, where migrating shorebirds preen and scutter in aching beauty. I ask whether this image is one that will persist in our post-apocalyptic montage, the cinematic sequence of “before-times” that is a cheap trope of zombie movies. I am not denying the beauty; it is more real than anything I could imagine. But I am recognizing that its magnificence right now matters.

I, too, am terrified of collapse.

vii.

Have I answered the question of care? Do I care about anyone on that stage?

There is a slight terror that there is no “I” without stage directions, no self without a manual that clarifies the moves and determines a winner.

On stage, the players start and they stop, they move about, and they don’t become. They are inhabiting the frame. There is a “Twilight Zone” sense about the house, with players trapped in a formal realm unable to remember themselves.

And as the months progress for Ranevskaya and as the stubborn finality of the estate auction approaches, there is no sense of decay or rebirth. There is only lost context, or perhaps frame. It is ironic because in the staging I watched, many of the actors were part of an ensemble. I had seen them perform before and it heightened the sense that each was inhabiting an exhausted trope. There is a queer discomfort sometimes with a familiar actor. It suggests that even our rebellions against the script are just part of the rotation.

I cannot say I cared for most of the characters. Maybe the old valet, but that is sentimental, and what he represented, complete capture, is too facile. It is dull Nihilism.

I did not want to see any of the characters harmed, and I cared that Ranevskaya had lost a child. That is brutal and real and outside any societal frame. I also felt for Varya, with “happily ever after” presumed and then crushingly foreclosed. The staging may have been too cerebral to offer the prospect of care.

Or perhaps I am. Care requires that the object be allowed to be what it is, without a system of interpretation organizing it. Perhaps I came to this production as someone who has been thinking too much. Perhaps I am sorting the play into wheels and wings.

I have lost sympathy for the loss of privilege and expectation. These are the losses of game-playing and turn-taking. But some losses exist outside the board: a lost child, unrealized love, even a retreating river. These foreclose possibility. The difference is not habitat versus society. It is whether the loss would hurt in any century, under any rules.

Humble change is the heart of the post-nihilistic becoming. Collapse should be rare. Things should change over time, become unrecognizable. Collapse happens because we freeze our model and rage against a world that won’t hold still.

That is the curse of humanity. We are seduced by complexity, and we cannot resist the lure of the flame. We thrill at the creation of artificial intelligence and deny the intelligence of nature. We are condemned to have our heart torn out over and over again because we cannot stop playing with fire.

We are blind and bound.

We keep making the promise. Every new technology, every new social order, every new myth of progress arrives with the implicit guarantee that this time the model will hold, and each model is revealed as contingent. AI feels inevitable and brave and new, as industrial capitalism did, as the brotherhood of man did. The people beaming as they squirt satellites into space are not villains. They’re just the latest to be seduced by the fire, certain that this time we’ll manage it.

But the scale of the promise is the scale of the damage. Giant systems create giant despair — in their creation and their dissolution. The Romanovs didn’t just fall. They took millions with them. As did the Lopakhins and Trofimovs of the Twentieth Century.

I find myself wanting smaller fires. A belief held in proportion. A garden, not a machine.

viii

The post-nihilist position is just being aware that we need a system of belief to make sense of the universe, but it cannot have privilege. It should be a tender approximation, allowing change and accepting that it is not right and won’t explain everything, but perhaps it is not unkind.

I still can’t figure one thing out. The play was three hours long and I was engaged every moment, but it was outside of me. Was I looking too hard? I could not fight the urge to see the characters as pieces and prior roles: a millennial with a speech affectation and well-plucked eyebrows, a matron with deep beauty and a full bosom who was both young and aging. I was present but estranged, watching the system more than the people inside it.

It was not mine. That is ok.

ix

We are an aging audience watching a play about a world ending, performed by actors exhausted by their own roles. The whole room is a before-times montage. Everyone there knows it, at some level, and we have paid for the privilege of knowing it together.

Even the most authentic form of witness to our own contingency is contingent.

The people for whom Chekhov is a living conversation, rather than a curriculum, are aging out. What replaces it may be genuine, but it will be a different grammar entirely, with different metaphors and different blind spots.

I had not read Chekhov or seen him performed before Friday night, and was not prepared to discover that I may be one of the characters, paralyzed by my own terror at change.

I am there because I love the theater and because I was invited by someone who loves the theater more. I do worry that there is only so much more the form can teach me, but then the theater may be giving me companionship more than discovery. Chekhov’s worldview is not quite mine — his is one where totalizing narratives collapse into exhaustion. I believe in localized narratives, the garden, not the machine.

It is also possible that my experience is just my experience, one of 120 experiences that night in the audience, and a different me at a different time will see a different Chekhov.

I also realize while watching that I am still adolescent. I still fondly remember the high school crush, the three nights I played Dauntless and could sing. I remember Alec Guinness in “A Walk in the Woods” with a good friend in London’s West End. And I do want it back. I don’t want the girl, and I have now already seen the play. But I want the feeling of safety and fitting.

I want to spill the Legos across the floor and make something that is nothing. I want to see cherry trees outside the window. I want to be tucked into bed, and told everything will be OK. But that wasn’t the case then, and it isn’t now. The nursery is repainted, and my father tossed the old bricks.

There are only the shorebirds, and the tides, at least for now.