fear

I’ll confess to you as a friend, in moments of anguish I’ve sometimes pictured to myself the hour of my death, my fantasy has invented thousands of the most gloomy visions, and I’ve managed to drive myself to tormenting exaltation, to nightmare, and that, I assure you, did not seem more frightening to me than reality. Needless to say, visions are frightening, but life is frightening, too. I, my dear friend, do not understand and am afraid of life… When I lie in the grass and look for a long time at a bug that was born yesterday and doesn’t understand anything, it seems to me that its whole life consists of nothing but horror, and I see myself in it.

I’m not a profound man by nature and I have little interest in such questions as life after death, the destiny of mankind, and generally i rarely soar into the heavenly heights. I’m frightened by the commonplace, which none of us can escape from. I’m unable to tell what in my actions is true or false, and they bother me; I’m aware that the conditions of life and my upbringing confined me to a narrow circle of lies, and that my whole life is nothing but a daily worry about deceiving myself and others and not noticing it, and I’m frightened by the thought that till death I won’t get out of this lie… I don’t understand people, my dear friend, and I’m afraid of them.

Anton Chekhov, 1892. Trans Peaver and Volokhonsky, 2020.