How inner conflict makes dullards of us all

r something like that. Having never read Chekov previously and also having no historical context for his writing, what follows is an entirely off-the-cuff stream of thoughts relating to the short novel, The Duel (translated by Constance Garnett, as recommended by Hemingway).

On the surface, this seems to be a story about a bunch of locals with nothing better to do than squabble and moralise at each other. Since all they have are their own experiences and opinions and lack much depth, they are not terribly interesting or sustainable characters, but their observations of each other carry some weight to the reader.

Instead of just taking the situation at face value, it's also possible to see the conflict as a metaphor for the conflict within an individual. In particular, the two gentlemen who wind up dueling, Laevsky and Von Koren, might be representative of the conflicting aspects of a personality, two ways in which to react to the surrounding world. Both consider society to be broken and useless. Laevksy chooses to spend his life full of apathy and regret, avoiding engagement, while Von Koren displays aggression towards others in a misconstrued attempt to bring them around to his philosophy, and also toward himself in order to maintain his prescription of action.

By the time the characters reach the grounds of the duel, they have both lost their motivation and aggression and decide not to follow through. They are the dueling aspects of a personality: at great odds with each other right up until the critical point, when nothing comes of the whole business (and the deacon steps in! Don't get me started on spirituality). They continue on their paths and gradually make some changes in their lives, but the grand, driving force of pure dogmatism has disappeared.

So I suppose the lesson I took from this was that holding your ground and acting on/being true to your character is important to maintaining an identity and strong progression through life. Don't stand still or get lost in internal debate, but use conflict to come to new places in thought and in life. Or something like that.

Dear Mr. Freud...

...Thank you for reminding me that you were quite a misogynistic twit.

I just went back into my copy of Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis from college to look up symbolism in dreams. I'd had one about quelques tours en l'air (a ballet jump where one leaps and turns one- to several times in the air) in which I could jump and then, Mary Poppins style, continue rotating casually much longer than gravity should have permitted. So I went to look up dreams about flying, only remembering something about their having to do with sex:

Dreams can symbolize erection in yet another, far more expressive manner. They can treat the sexual organ as the essence of the dreamer's whole person and make him himself fly. ...And do not make an objection out of the fact that women can have the same flying dreams as men. Remember, rather, that our dreams aim at being the fulfillments of wishes and that the wish to be a man is found so frequently, consciously or unconsciously, in women.

Right. That's it. My flying dreams are not, in fact, anything to do with a desire to escape the bounds of gravity (daily life) and to ascend to something more spectacular, to leave the humdrum behind, break free of seemingly unstoppable forces (gravity, society, money etc), they're really only about my wanting to be a man. Who would want to be a woman, anyway? bah.