Young Writers Society

~PART II~

I

A young man aboard a train

There is much thought to be put into the situation of this young man. This was a man without a father. This was a man who worked on a little farm with his mother and sister and ate a slice of rye bread and porridge every day. He felt content well into his early adolescence but little by little he developed a love of drawing and art. And this became evident; he would often spend hours staring at rays of sunlight as they reflected off many different things around his little home including silverware, clothes, and furniture. And he would spend hours drawing the many things which garnered his curiosity as he grew out of childhood. And even when he grew out of childhood, this fascination with art persisted.

His mother was very much liked by many people in her village. Many people admired her greatly. Consequently, the young man’s humble home was oftentimes crowded with local villagers, farmworkers, and, even, local bureaucrats, who simply wanted to converse with her while she prepared dinner for her children. They found her pithiness quite amusing and even motivating. And when this young man was a child, he remembered hearing some of these people in his home discuss various matters with his mother and amongst themselves. His home had slowly become something of a salon, hosted by his mother. This was a salon for the poor folk and laborers and farmers.

One topic, of the many discussed, was of the many fantastic art schools in Petersburg. It is no doubt that this topic arose when one of the boy’s several drawings happened to slip into the living quarters and catch the eye of an impressed gentleman. Upon hearing of these fantastic places where talented young men go to perfect their art, the young boy could not contain his bubbling excitement and began to even dream of these schools. It struck him as marvelous that these places existed, and, through his childish perspective of things, the idea of these schools magnified within his mind. They were, to him, fantastic places, foreign to reality, brimming with imagination. To him, this is where people gathered together to learn and to create, far from any drabness.

Years later, he awoke one morning before the sunrise, took a large sum of cash from his mother’s savings and bought a train ticket, headed to Petersburg. This seems like a very unremarkable story. It is perhaps so because of how it can quickly be judged that the young man acted in such a haste, that he overlooked the evil in his actions. Of course, the young man stole knowing full well that the money was intended by the mother for someday buying a plot of land to gift her son, so that he may begin his livelihood and live off of his labor someday. We cannot say for certain whether or not this young man had expressed to his mother his deep and sincere desire to pursue a professional career in the arts or whether his mother’s maternal pragmatism would come to light, evident by any scoffing or ridicule at the idea. We can, however, conclude that this theft is, at best, ambiguous in itself. Surely this is not the point of all this anguish he feels months later, aboard the Tsar Nikolai Korolevskiy Vagon. It was the act of leaving which sickened the mother, the mere abandonment itself.

Likewise, we do not know the premeditation of this action. It is uncertain whether this man had thought about, and perhaps even dreamed about, stealing cash from his mother’s savings and traveling. This is certainly one possibility. But it could, to our chagrin, be that he in fact acted on pure impulse. Maybe he had fantasized about, in a vague sense, fulfilling his dream of studying art in Petersburg. And this thought had manifested in his mind as a mere desire. A mere desire that has no appendage; that has nothing, no sequence of physical actions or decisions, with which to become reality and no longer a mere desire. He was perhaps not of the mental maturity to delineate the next step: to steal. If this is the case, it could be that he only conceived of the terrible act for a mere moment before acting on pure impulse. Now, let us say that this is true. Let us say that it is true that this mere desire lingered casually in his mind but never actually influenced his faculties to produce a thought of what to actually do, that is, to steal. If this is so, we might be called to praise the young man. Yes, praise! We will not judge the theft in of itself to be good or evil. There is ambiguity to be left. Now, certainly, we are called to praise the man for the general course of action. This is quite simple: he had a dream, and he fulfilled it. Is that so despicable? Is it worthy of spite? Surely it is, if we do away with this moral ambiguity. There is perhaps no more detestable crime than that of stealing from one’s own mother. But we have now condemned this man for his happiness, supposing that there is any happiness at all. Happiness, then, is so detestable.

The confoundedness is in the mystery of why one cannot find much happiness or pleasure or much of the like at all under the circumstances of this young man. He sat completely inertly on this train without a thought lingering for more than an almost comically short moment. After any such comically short thought, he turned to either the exquisitely crafted door of the train car and admired its beauty, or to the lights hung above his head. Or he simply gently laid his head against the head rest, wrapped his coat over his chest, and slept. And slept and slept. The confoundedness is in the mystery of how he must live with the implications of his actions. A man must act and in doing so creates for himself the natural outcomes of this action. It is unavoidable for there is always the idea of what could have been. Thus there is the choice. The choice of this young man is clear and his decision is clear. He fled. He fled from the slow decay of his dreams and the deadening of the very light which kept his heart warm and alive. This is art. Art is the light and warmth, to be fed, nurtured, and grown. This slow decay would have surely manifested in the physical emaciation of his face. It would have manifested in the growing physical resemblance to his own withered mother. He would have adopted form his mother, if anything, her misery in her old age. He would have grown pale from the weariness of perfunctory routine and lightless, lifeless labor. A pestilence would have begun to grow in his heart, and grow and grow until he would have himself become as lightless and lifeless as his labor. He had avoided such a fate, however, by fleeing to Petersburg. But this too has its natural outcome or natural consequences. The natural outcome being the tremendous guilt which festered. It festered but plateaued for a short while in Petersburg. He met Vera. He fell in love. And just as quickly fell out of love, perhaps? Indeed, such passion he felt towards her, the very simple physical desire, was quickly muted and he is tasked with knowing what remains. Nothing, perhaps.

There is something to note about this young man. It is true that he often thought of his mother, and the decision he had made several months ago. The importance is in how and what he thought of it. Whenever he fell asleep it was only after feeling the discomfort of the thought which he had before deciding on another nap. This was his mother, the image of her face, the image of his home right before he left, the sounds of his mother weeping softly and crackling fire, and, of course, the smell of the pasture outside. It was these thoughts that at one point, particularly, in his first bad dream aboard the Tsar Nikolai Korolevskiy Vagon, he felt incredibly nauseated and suddenly utterly confined in the ornate walls of the train car. After he read the note his sister had sent him, he instantly felt nauseated and wanted to release the immense emotions which were instantly conjured within him. But this was improper. He was surrounded, of course, by lords and ladies of the highest ranking families of Petersburg no less. So he sat quietly, and ordered a glass of wine. Or two or three. He did not drink enough to cause impairment in any significant way, but it was enough to make sleep easy. So he slept, of course.

One could muse for quite a while on the nature of this drinking, and of this sleeping, which we may take to be alternatives for the improper behavior. We look again at this young man: this was a young man who was reared in the lowest caste of Russia in the 1840s. He was as poor as the soil which surrounded him. And then he traveled to Petersburg and, for the sake of argumentation and simplicity, fell in love with a girl of pronounced social standing. And he became an artist. And while he left this girl not very long after her father refused to let him pursue his daughter any further, and at the same time quite long after receiving a portentous telegram, he embraced the impulse to quell any form of expression. This is the improper behavior.

At present, the young man found himself not at all nauseated or sickened by these thoughts which persisted and recurred typically after he had observed something beautiful for a long while. He did not even feel guilt at, at least not of the magnitude which would have had him sobbing terribly. No, this was quite different now. He felt only discomfort. This is as if he had been sitting on a prickly thorn for a minute, and, only a minute after, jumped to his feet and sat back down. Discomfort is what motivated him to dismiss all the thoughts. Thoughts which he was surely ready to throw out the window in almost staunch and nonsensical disapprobation. This is the sort of staunch and nonsensical disapprobation with which a child may refuse a certain plaything. Or this could easily be the sort of staunch and nonsensical disapprobation with which a child may foolishly refuse to eat dinner.

One cannot be brought to shame the young man at all, regardless of how much one may like to drag oneself onto the train, give him a good blow to the head and shout at him to be happy. To shout and command him to be happy and enjoy his life and art, it seems. This is a mistake, for the fault in the young man is not in that he cannot enjoy his art, but that he will never enjoy it, it seems. He must, to keep himself perfectly comfortable and undisturbed, roll over and have his back face these thoughts. This is the forfeiture of any sort of control or consciousness one has for one’s own life. We must not imagine this young man comfortable after such forfeiture. We must not think him truly happy. And it is like so: we realize that our actions, indeed, even our act to commit to no single action, must be carried on our bare backs, piling on to each other and piercing into our skin as we march our resolute march to the grave. This is frightening and nauseating to us, and, certainly, to this young man on the train, that he, and indeed, all of us, may find refuge in his freedom to simply sleep and to simply forget. But this is why there is no happiness, and certainly, no torture. To sleep is to forfeit happiness and torture, but this is in our hands. This young man has worked so very hard for his ideal, for his art, but all of this is left to decay in the desolate state of inertness or the surrender of consciousness and, in effect, freedom itself.

He awoke. “Sir?” asked a conductor. This conductor stood hunched over, facing the young man as he returned to reality. “Sir?”

“Yes, yes?” the young man replied, groggily and thoroughly annoyed. He rubbed his eyes and blinked rapidly for a moment, taking in once again the bright lights within the train car.

“I am very sorry, but I must see your ticket now.” The conductor outstretched an arm and held his hand out. Despite having awoken a guest, this man seemed not at all apologetic, and in fact, seemed to take a perverse joy in administrating and, more specifically, administrating at the cost of a passenger’s comfort. This is the sort of fellow that walks by exuding an aura of extreme contemptuousness and, as an effect, naturally evokes the deep disliking within even the most timid and understanding people.

“A ticket? I don’t recall ever having a ticket, I’m afraid,” slurred the young man, rubbing his eyes slowly and his face contorted under the abrupt pressure and brightness of reality. He was confused. “Train?”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“A train ticket?”

The conductor became irritated, but attempted to contain himself while he spoke politely albeit forcedly. “Yes, sir, I am collecting the train tickets now.”

The young man reached into his coat, which lay stretched over his lap. He pulled out a piece of paper and gave it to the impatient conductor, who was without a doubt irritated by having to vet the very crumpled ticket. “Very good, sir,” he sighed after a considerable while, after which he proceeded to annoy the next passenger.

The young man attempted to return to his slumbering but could not. He rustled back and forth in his seat while the fat woman beside him, with the bright vermilion finish on her nails, remarked to herself on the boy’s rude motions. He seemed to wrestle, with his hands cupped beneath his underarms and his face forcefully poised downwards, avoiding the brightness of the lights above him. He wrestled with sleep itself, and its cruel refusal to put the young man out once more. In defeat, he pulled out his book and read:

…From the harrowing sounds from outside, the old man concluded that the storm had not ended, and that his son had, in the most likely case, perished along the journey. The old man wept upon realizing this, and held himself tightly under his wool blanket. In his many subsequent thoughts, he remembered the crimes of his youth: he fell madly in love with a young girl, but soon became separated from her and for a long while never sought after her. Even as this old man thinks now, he does not recall her tenderly, but in a way that is rather illuminating. Because he remembered her now, he became illuminated to the fact that he did not love her, and so too he became illuminated of the apparent pointlessness of his long past moments of suffering and longing for her. He suffered while having no love for her. This was perhaps due to the fact that he had also incidentally abandoned his only friend many decades ago. This old man was once strong in character and boasted a mind unlike any other. He was not interested in merely observing and silently judging, for this is a very distasteful and unsuitable lifestyle for such a man. This old man preferred to become heated, to exercise in full capacity and to anyone that challenged him, the thoughts that once only loomed in his mind. But, much like those with a quietness of spirit, there is nothing left at present but the misery of an old man left to contemplate only the crimes of his youth.

The young man stopped reading and thought to himself. What a terribly boring book, he thought, as he pulled out another sheet of parchment paper. He found under his thigh the pen with which he was writing earlier. And he wrote:

Dear Vera,

It seems that I cannot merely write two little letters to you, the most beautiful woman on this planet. But, certainly, the most beautiful woman should not have to receive only one letter. Although, in truth, I may be exceptionally bored. In any case, I feel the need to talk to you through this letter. I miss you so much and it has only been a few days since I’ve last seen you. Ah I so wish I could have been able to say farewell to you at the station before I departed. I think I would be able to better tolerate this wretched environment if I had seen you before I left. But, at least, the beauty of this train keeps me occupied at times. I have drawn so many sketches and I am so very anxious to share them with you. In particular, I simply cannot keep myself from admiring one of the car doors aboard this train. It’s such a particular door. You shall see from the sketches what I mean. If only I were talented enough to fully capture the beauty of the door. The highest achievement in my artistic career would indeed be that: to fully capture the beauty of something. Nothing else. That would be marvelous. On another note, it also seems that Sleep itself has become as tired of me as I have become tired of this journey; I have not been able to sleep in the past half-hour and I am horribly irritated. It could be for this reason that I am writing. It could also be that I need to share something personal with you. It is of course about my mother. I know that when you read this, I will have already arrived at Moscow and I will have already seen her, but I must go on about it now or this whole journey may be useless. I find myself unable to exactly define how I am feeling. My whole life has, up to now, been quite interesting: I was born into a dastardly poor family with no father, as you know, and I had the audacity to steal from my poor mother, (something which I may want to mention though I am not sure how I feel about it), travelled to Petersburg, went to art school, and, above all, met you of course. My whole life has been one big development or escalation, and I know for a fact that I have reached a zenith because I have the most wonderful proof of all, which is you, but I am not so certain that I feel it resonate deeply within me. There is something buried deep within me and I am certain that it is something ugly. The more I think about this, however, the less I want to continue thinking. And so I think I will not continue. Ah in the end, it is beyond a doubt in my mind that my cruel mother deserves much blame. Yes, I say cruel here because of how she tortured me so in the moments before I left her. I have not told you this in the past, perhaps because of the little talking we do, but it is true that before leaving, my mother begged me to stay and reconsider. I could not possibly reconsider! But the amount of guilt she forced me to experience was cruel. I cannot say I feel it now, since I have done much maturing since then, but I cannot say exactly what it is that I feel. It was certainly her devilish action which is now impeding me from savoring my happiness in its totality. You need not worry, however. I am perfectly well. All that I need to do is relax myself a bit, and dispel such unpleasantness. I hope that I have not bored you too much with this dreadful monologue. In the end, I will see you soon, and, when I return, I hope to do some more of our little talking with you.

Love,

Once more, he left this letter unsigned, but did not give the fact more than a mere observation. He carefully folded the letter and placed it into his sac, along with the other letters.

“I see you’ve got a letter there,” spoke the fat woman to his left. He was immediately struck by her voice as one would be struck by calamitous news. She spoke with her characteristically fastidious timbre but with incredible incisiveness.

He turned to her. She had such a pale, wide face and an engorged nose. She was clearly no younger than fifty. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Is it for family? Or, perhaps, for a closer loved one?” she smiled hideously. “I daresay, you are a terribly handsome young man. I wouldn’t be surprised at all.”

“Oh no, you are mistaken, I am afraid,” he blushed slightly, and smiled. And with talent, he masked his anxiety. What a deceiver! The young man rested his arms on his lap and leaned his head against the head-rest, almost smugly, as if delighted both by being complimented and by having lied in such a quick and natural manner. He lied very naturally about Vera. On the very surface of his conscious decision-making faculties, he lied only because of how brief the lie would have made the interaction with the woman.

He turned quickly to the sketches propped against the window to his right. From the window, he quickly saw his reflection and he regarded himself. His face was thin and long and with a pair of dull-brown eyes. He was certainly a very handsome fellow; his opal-black hair was meticulously parted to one side and the excess was held neatly behind his ears.

“It is for a relative then? Is it for your parents?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m writing these to my father.”

“Oh, so are you leaving home from Petersburg?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Where to?”

“I am going to university this term.”

“For how long?”

“A few months.”

“Wonderful. And what are you are studying?”

The man was surprised to hear the question. “I am studying art.”

“Art? How splendid. My husband used to be an artist. Unfortunately, he can no longer paint,” she looked at her hands, which she held close to her chest, and then she looked nostalgically at the drawings propped by the window to the young man’s right. “He’s gone blind, you see. Or, at least, he can’t see as well as he once could.”

“What a tragedy,” he replied, with utmost care as to not let any of his true indifference become detectable. “I could not possibly imagine living like that, to be deprived in such a barbaric way.”

She paused their conversation for a moment by flinging her fat arm into the air as an attendant was walking down the aisle. She made a loud grunt and the attendant turned around to face her. “Would the madam like a drink?”

“Vodka,” she said curtly. The attendant nodded, bowed slightly, and exited the car. She turned enthusiastically to the young man. “I wonder if I may prod you, a young man of education and artistic capability, about a topic very near to my heart.”

“I don’t believe myself to be very educated, madam,” he said quickly. He was, of course, hardly a graduate of a modest art school in Petersburg when this woman, of prestige and title, began to engage this poor boy in educated banter. Above all things which prevented him from engaging with anyone at all, what particularly stood out was his aversion to humiliation, and, more specifically, his fear of being condemned. He did not want to have to begin speaking with surely a very educated woman, only to have to come to a halt once this woman came to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that the boy was a mere fake. And it would break him so to, with his keen vision, observe the exact moment when the woman subtly ends the conversation upon discovering the truth of the boy. And it would break him so to have to, with his keen vision, observe the subtle contemptuousness in her face with which she would turn away from him.

“You must let me elaborate. I would like your own personal and professional opinion of what it means, exactly, to be an artist.”

The young man looked at the woman for a moment. She looked at him with her eyes opened widely and holding her hands together as a small rodent would. There was a silence. “Don’t tell me you cannot say a thing,” she said. “I have, through my husband, met many artists in my day.” She became upright and indignant upon remembering this. “And they have all given me the same dumb rhetoric about it: ‘oh it is so and so’, and ‘it is like being caressed by angels and inspired by God’, and ‘oh I really can’t say, madam, for, if by knowing the features and qualities of artistry with our language, one would lose the essence of art.’” She rolled her eyes and gasped. “How terrible all this mysticism is! Please tell me that an artist such as yourself can help dispel my prejudices.”

“Well,” he thought for a moment. “To be quite frank, I wouldn’t disagree with what you were told.” She didn’t become upset, but regarded him carefully while he spoke. “Each individual has a purpose and that purpose, in general, is to serve the greater good. Now, with artists, we find that our purpose is to serve, specifically, the greater beauty. She inspires us artists, who are just like anyone else I should add, but who have a greater sensitivity to what she has to show us. And, in turn, we grace her with our art, in an attempt to achieve and encapsulate her beauty as a whole. So, to be an artist is to aim at capturing the greater beauty with his craft.”

The fat lady remained motionless for a moment. She lifted her chin in contemplation and then spoke. “I must disagree, young man.”

The young man raised his eyebrows. And as she spoke he masked the level of his disagreement and, in fact, contempt very well. It seemed stupefying to him that he would be feeling such a sense of superiority in a conversation with an educated woman. He was the superior, of course. He was an artist. Who could argue with an artist? “I think,” she went on. “That this is such a terrible way of thinking about art. I think that the main function of art should have concrete reverberations in our lives. All of our lives. The task of the artist is not to serve some higher beauty,” she chuckled. “Such a detached and lonesome concept that is. Art is about love.”

“Surely, I know nothing about love,” he interrupted sarcastically. It was unfitting for him to speak out of term in such a way, but he was sensitive on the matter.

The lady did not recognize this sarcasm and continued seriously. “No, I don’t think you do. The love that I speak of is a rare one, unfortunately and quite contrary to what we’d expect. It is so rare, especially in this younger generation, to see this genuine love. There is only habit. Habit and bad taste. We should not ask what it is that we mere mortals can do for the greater beauty, but, rather, what it is that this greater beauty can do for us mere mortals, who I can say are simply trying to enjoy our short lives.” There was a silence. “I can see that you are sensitive on the matter.”

“An artist who does not ponder, truly ponder, his art, is no artist at all, madam,” he said confidently.

The lady pulled out from within a pocket in her dress an ornamental fan. She opened it quite smugly and so suggestively, also casually darting her gaze away from the young man on occasion. She fanned slowly and the young man observed the shimmering of the gold sequins, inlaid within the fan. The dazzle of each sequin followed a rhythmic back and forth motion synchronized with the fat lady’s lethargic fanning. “I would put some more thought into the matter if I were you,” she said casually and without looking at him. He too ceased being courteous.

“You spoke of ‘habit’. What exactly did you mean by this?”

The attendant had, at this point, returned holding a silver platter on which a dainty glass of vodka was balanced at the center. The madam took the glass and recognized the attendant with a slight bow of her head, and the attendant left afterwards. She slurped up the entire dink in one go and faced the young man. “Well, I think I could easily stare at that beautiful Russian landscape for hours,” she said pointing at the pastures to the boy’s right. “I could also very easily sit out in my garden back in Petersburg with a nice cup of tea on a summer evening and watch, surrounded by my flowerbeds, the sunset and the pastures beyond my estate, in my full view. And I could marvel at these fascinating little things which the colors of the pasture fading from a dark and deep green to a splendid bronze as the sun would slowly withdraw its influence over color itself. And let me tell you something, young man, I would absolutely revel in it. Not many people could. Not many farmworkers, in their laboring, or many lords and ladies. Do you know what I would have just engaged in? I would have just engaged in a breaking of habit. I find myself, in all my wealth, in a luxurious position, where such moments of breaking habit can be easy to come by, which is why someone so obviously impoverished as yourself would have a harder time dealing with the clutches of habit.” At this, the fat lady paused and the young man, while not looking at her, blushed. “I should say, however, that while I am in such a luxurious position, this in no way makes me more prone to escaping terrible habit,” and she looked pessimistically at her hands as she spoke. Her eyebrows knitted in a very subtle way and her lips became bent into a very particular shape. Her bottom lip curled upwards ever so slightly, and her voice became tinged with sadness. “This is such a grave mistake! I have met many lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses, to whom art is not a complete mystery. They think that art is simply a thing that they do or engage in, inherently and unquestionably, as top-tier members of society. The worst thing about it, is that they, in their living in the grand style, become utterly convinced that they, and only they, dictate true artistry. They have become convinced that art is absolutely anything but a mystery. And so habit consumes them.” She did not speak for a moment, and neither did the young man, who was now staring blankly at the beautifully ornate door dividing the Tsar Nikolai Korolevskiy Vagon from those ahead of it. She glanced at the boy, and at the door, and then seemed to be defeated in her speech. “I don’t think I should bother you with silly queries any further. I am sure that a young artist such as yourself is constantly challenging himself with these queries already, and that from them, you arrive at a definitive answer and that, from this answer, you will be happy,” she grinned. “You have been staring at that door for quite some time in this trip.”

“Oh,” remarked the young man, now conscious once again of the lady’s existence. “I am terribly sorry, but it has been quite a long and tiring journey so far, and we still have quite a ways to go.”

“Oh don’t trouble yourself at all. As I was saying, I’ll not disturb you any further. I was also commenting on your fascination with that door over there. I see you have also drawn many sketches of it,” she pointed at some two or three sketches propped against the window. “They are very good sketches. And it is a lovely door! It is a shame, however, that, as I am fully certain of, that door is not as beautiful from the other side.”

“I’d rather not even think about the other side, madam,” the young man replied. He bent over and lifted his heavy overcoat, which had fallen to the ground. He then placed it over himself and tilted his head to the side. “I think I should sleep now; as I said, we have quite a ways to go and I am rather tired.”

“My, you’ve been sleeping nearly this entire trip,” exclaimed the fat lady as she called the attention of another attendant who was walking down the aisle, politely interrupting other guests’ conversations by offering drinks. She ordered another glass of vodka, and the young man fell asleep once again.