She knows, too, that I have no belief in the theatre. She loves the stage, she fancies she is working for humanity, for the holy cause of art, while to my mind the modern theatre is nothing but tradition and conventionality. When the curtain goes up, and by artificial light, in a room with three walls, these great geniuses, the devotees of holy art, represent how people eat, drink, love, move about, and wear their jackets; when from these commonplace sentences and pictures they try to draw a moral--a petty moral, easy of comprehension and convenient for domestic use; when in a thousand variations I am offered the same thing over and over again--I run away as Maupassant ran away from the Eiffel Tower which weighed upon his brain with its vulgarity.
Let us talk though. We will talk about my splendid bright life....Well, where shall we begin? (After thinking a little) There are such things as fixed ideas, when a man thinks days and night, for instance, of nothing but the moon. And I have just such a moon. I am haunted day and night by one persistent thought: I ought to be writing, I ought to be writing, I ought...I have scarcely finished one novel when, for some reason, I must begin writing another, then a third, after the third a fourth. I write incessantly, post haste, and I can't write in any other way. What is there splendid and bright in that, I ask you? Oh, it's an absurd life! Here I am with you; I am excited, yet every moment I remember that my unfinished novel is waiting for me. here I see a cloud that looks like a grand piano. I think that I must put into a story somewhere that a cloud sailed by that looked like a grand piano. There is a scent of heliotrope. I hurriedly make a note: a sickly smell, a widow's flower, to be mentioned in the description of a summer evening. I catch up myself and you at every sentence, every word, and make haste to put those sentences and words away into my literary treasure-house--it may come in useful! When I finish work I race off to the theatre or to fishing; if only I could rest in that and forget myself. But no, there's a new subject rolling about in my head like a heavy iron cannon ball, and I am drawn to my writing table and must make haste again to go on writing and writing. And it's always like that, always. And I have no rest from myself, and I feel that I am eating up my own life, and that for the sake of honey I give to someone in space I am stripping the pollen from my best flowers, tearing up the flowers themselves and trampling on their roots. Don't you think I am mad? Do my friends and acquaintances treat me as though I were sane? 'What are you writing? What are you giving us?' It's the same thing again and again, and it seems to me as though my friends notice, their praises, their enthusiasm--that it's all a sham, that they are deceiving me as an invalid and I am somehow afraid that they will steal up to me from behind, snatch me and carry me off and put me in a mad-house. And in those years, the best years of my youth, when I was beginning, my writing was unmixed torture. A small writer, particularly when he is not successful, seems to himself clumsy, awkward, unnecessary; his nerves are strained and overwrought. He can't resist hanging about people connected with literature and art, unrecognised and unnoticed by anyone, afraid to look anyone boldly in the face, like a passionate gambler without any money. I hadn't seen my reader, but for some reason I always imagined him hostile, and mistrustful. I was afraid of the public, it alarmed me, and when I had to produce my first play it always seemed to me that all the dark people felt hostile and all the fair ones were coldly indifferent. Oh, how awful it was! What agony it was!Walking out my door this morning, I noticed there was a whopping big hay stack in the front yard. I happened to be looking for a needle at the time, so I figured there wasn't any place that I was more likely to find a needle than in the haystack. People talk about needles in haystacks often enough. I jumped in. What else would you do if you were confronted with a haystack? If you had a girl with you, I guess you'd make hay, but I didn't, so needle-hunting was the next best thing.
It's all foolishness. There is no such thing as hopeless love except in novels. It's of no consequence. The only thing is one mustn't let oneself go and keep expecting something, waiting for the tide to turn....When love gets into the heart there is nothing to be done but to clear it out. Here they promised to transfer my husband to another district. As soon as I am there, I shall forget it all....I shall tear it out of my heart.
Why do you say that you kissed the earth on which I walked? I ought to be killed. (Bends over table) I am so tired! If I could rest...if I could rest! (Raising her head) I am a sea-gull....No, that's not it. I am an actress. Oh, well!
Now I know, I understand, Kostya, that in our work--in acting or writing--what matters is not fame, not glory, not what I dreamed of, but knowing how to be patient. To bear one's cross and have faith. I have faith and it all doesn't hurt so much, and when I think of my vocation I am not afraid of life.
I don't know if you've ever been inside a haystack before, but it's not a terribly pleasant place, although, more spacious than I had imagined. Also more claustrophobic. Well, I went on in to that haystack and squirmed around a bit. I had imagined the best way to find the needle would be to let the thing stick you in the finger or something, you know, act like a giant pin cushion and see if you couldn't come out one needle to the good, but it turns out that hay is pretty prickly itself, so I found out pretty quickly that the haystack was full of pricks and very few of them were the needle. So I abandoned that idea and decided I might as well just go clutching after whatever there might happen to be in the haystack.
It wasn't long before I laid hold of something that surely wasn't hay, well I got all excited and tried to find my way back out of the haystack so I could look at this thing I'd grabbed, if I haven't mentioned it yet, I have to say that it's pretty dark in the haystack. Of course, I couldn't find my way out. I must have been going in circles, I don't see how else it could have been, but anyways, I resigned myself to being in the haystack for while. I pulled out my flashlight which I hadn't known I'd had until just then and had a look at what I'd found.
Well, it was a toy boat. It had a red hull and a white plastic set of decks and red smoke stacks, at least three of them. It was nice, but it wasn't really that useful for man adventuring in a haystack, and it sure as hell wasn't my needle that I was looking for in the haystack, so I tossed the toy boat aside, cast it adrift you might say, and went on looking for my needle.
The strategies available to a man looking for a needle in a haystack are pretty numerous. You can, say, burn down the haystack, consume it all in a fire and then sort through a much small pile of ashes for your needle, only thing is, it doesn't work so good when you are part of the ashes, which is what I would be if I did, so that idea's no good to me.
I don't really have any other strategies, I was just saying that, you know, cause mostly I am just looking around, clutching at the things in the haystack, hoping one of them will be my needle.
Reached out again and found a plunger. That was disgusting.
Stretched out my hand again and found a string of Christmas lights. Now how did they get here? Again, they ain't a needle, but they are Christmas lights, and who knows, maybe they would help me out of the haystack, you know, kinda help me get back to the real world, on with my life. But I know, deep down, I'll wonder where the needle is, no string of lights will be of any help to me. Besides, I'd probably just end up wanting to search through the haystack again.
and found a kitchen pan of some stainless steel. But I don't know, it doesn't seem quite right to me. Maybe I could use it as a needle. I've never tried that but i hear it works sometimes, use what you find as a needle, lots of happy lives been made do with that way. But a needle like a stainless steel pan doesn't really help me. I want a real needle.
So I'll keep looking for the needle, or The Sea Gull
. Really, I've found it, I just can't quite get hold of it, but I will. As big as the haystack is, I've got the time and the will. I'll be back in the real world with my needle sooner or later.
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