karenika - books - the seagull

The Seagull

NINA: But you have a wonderful life!

TRIGORIN: What's so good about it? (looks at his watch.) I have to go and write now. I'm so sorry, I don't have any time(Laughs.) Youhow shall I put ityou've stepped on my toes, as they say, and frankly it's gotten to me and I'm a little annoyed. All right, so let's talk about it. Let's talk about my wonderful, brilliant lifeWhere shall we begin? (After a moment's thought.) Let's talk about obsession, when, for example, a man will think night and day about nothing else except the moon. Well, I have had my own moon. Day and night, one persistent thought will overpower me; and I have to write, I have to write, I have toAnd no sooner do I finish one story, then for some reason, I have to write another, and then a third, and after that a fourthI'll write constantly, as if I'm in a relay race, I can't stop. What's so wonderful and brilliant about that, I ask you? Oh, what a cruel life! Here I am with you, all excited and yet the whole time, I am thinking about the unfinished story that's waiting for me. I'll see that cloud up there, the one that looks like a piano. And I'll think: I've got to put that in a story somewhere, how a cloud was sailing by, a cloud that looked like a grand piano. The smell of heliotrope. Right away I'll make a note of it: sweetish scent, pinkish purple, use it when describing a summer's evening. Every phrase, every word you are I are saying now, I'll snatch them up as fast as I can and lock them away in my literary closet: Perhaps I'll use them one day! And when I'm through working, I'll run off to the theater, or go fishing, to rest, to lose myself, - but no, there it is, already casting around in my head like an iron cannonball, a new plot, and already it's pulling me back to my desk, and again I'm racing to write it down, to write, and write. And that's the way it always is, always, I have no peace from myself, and I feel that I'm devouring my own life, that in order to get that sweet honey, I give to my nameless, faceless public, I'm gathering the pollen from my own best flowers, then tearing these flowers up, and trampling their roots. Now, really, am I not crazy? Do me nearest and dearest treat me as if I were a sane man, really? "What are you writing now? What new gift will you bestow upon us next?" And so on, and so on, always the same thing over and over again, and I begin to think that all this attention my friends give to me, the praise, the admiration - that it's all a lie, that they're deceiving me, like they would a sick man, and sometimes I'm terrified that what they're really going to do is creep up behind me, grab me, and carry me off to the madhouse, like that poor fellow in Gogol's story. And even in the early years, the best years, when I was starting out, my writing was one continuous torture. A young writer, especially when he hasn't had any luck yet, feels clumsy, awkward, out of place, he's tense, on the edge; he's constantly hanging around other writers and artists, unrecognized, unnoticed, afraid to look anyone straight in the eye, like a compulsive gambler who has no money. I could not see my reader, but somehow I imagined him as unfriendly, mistrustful. And I was afraid of my audience, they terrified me, - every time my newest play would open, there they were before me, and I would imagine that everyone with dark hair was hostile, and everyone with fair hair was cold and indifferent. Oh, how terrible! What torture!

I checked out Chekov's The Seagull because I plan to see if performed by the cast of Shakespeare in the Park. I'd done the same for Measure for Measure.