Futility quotes

And then it struck me that the only thing to do was to fit all this into a book.

It is the classic way of treating life.

For my ineffectual return to Vladivostok is the effectual conclusion of my theme. And the harbour has been strangely, knowingly responsive.

You know the manner of Chekhov’s writing. You know the people in his plays.

It seems as though they had all been born on the line of demarcation between comedy and tragedy⁠—in a kind of No Man’s Land.

Fanny Ivanovna and the three sisters watched the play with intense interest, as if the Three Sisters were indeed their own particular tragedy. I sat behind Nina, and watched with that stupid scepticism that comes from too much happiness.

“ ‘Nein, besten Dank!’ I said. ‘No, thank you, blagadaru vas! I will return to Germany as soon as you give me the money—provide for me for life. I will not leave otherwise.’ ”

In her great tragedy she was still a sound business woman.

“Fanny Ivanovna,” I sighed, “good night.”

“I know it is amusing,” she said. “I wish it wasn’t real life, our life, my life. Then I would find it a trifle more amusing.”

I hailed a driver who slumbered in his sleigh on the corner of the Mohovaya and the Pantilemenskaya.

“

Half-truths are more dangerous than lies,

” said she. Here the porter returned with a cab.

and one by one the members of the family would leave the room on tiptoe, and the last one out would shut the door behind him noiselessly.

For Uncle Kostia was writing. What he wrote no one knew; he had never breathed a word about it to anyone. All we knew was that Uncle Kostia was very clever.

From what I could make out no one had ever seen a line of his writing. But that he thought a great deal there was no question. His life was spent in contemplation. But what it was he contemplated, equally no one knew.

It’s so easy. You just set down the facts. The only handicap that I’m aware of is that you are all of you so preposterously improbable that no one would believe that you were real. This is, in fact, the trouble with most modern literature.

No fiction is good fiction unless it is true to life, and yet no life is worth relating unless it be a life out of the ordinary; and then it seems improbable like fiction.

”

… day I sat at dinner with Zina’s people on the Petrograd side, and the presence of a score of students, male and female, an engineer, a lawyer, and a journalist or two, all of that revolutionary intelligentsia, probably accounted for the Liberal atmosphere that prevailed.

Yesterday they had been revolutionaries; today they were contented Liberals

, hailing Lvov and Miliukov as the heroes of the day. The engineer drank to the future: “The old world is dead: long live the new world!”

“Say it again,” breathed Nina.

“A fool,” said Nikolai Vasilievich, “is an optimist. He is optimistic about himself, optimistic about his folly. I’m an optimist!”

He stood up, his hands in his trouser pockets, and gazed at the window. Twilight was falling swiftly. Nina, perched up on the sofa, sat silent, her head bent.

“Warranting considerable pessimism,” supplied the Baron.

“It is easier to hope,” said Nikolai Vasilievich, “and be disappointed, it is easier to hope knowing that one will be disappointed, than not hope at all.”

“Why don’t the writers—the novelists—why don’t they write about this, this real life,” said Fanny Ivanovna, “this real drama of life, rather than their neat, reasoned, reasonable and—oh! so unconvincing novels?”

It is beyond us. Do you not know?’ … And we shall never know. Never. …”

“How awfully funnily your mouth moves when you speak,” said Nina

, who had been listening to me attentively.

“How awfully funnily your mouth moves when you speak,” said Nina, who had been listening to me attentively.

“There is no proof,” said Baron Wunderhausen, “that death is the end. But there is no proof, as yet, that death is not the end.”

“So there is no proof of anything?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich.

“Most of them, I think, would favour a Constitutional Monarchy,” proffered Nikolai Vasilievich.

“A constitutional monarchy in Russia,” retorted Uncle Kostia, “would invariably be more monarchical than constitutional.”

“Anyhow,” I said, “do have a drink.”

“No, no,” blushed Nikolai Vasilievich; and said in Russian, “Your English spelling is so difficult.

In English you spell a word ‘London’ and pronounce it ‘Birmingham.’

”

“Russian girls,” I continued, “are far more interesting and clever than other girls.”

“All girls,” the Admiral replied, “are stupid.”

“Oh!” groaned Uncle Kostia at my stupidity.

“Can’t you understand that it is the very fact of this physical futility that inflates me with a sense of spiritual importance?”

I looked at him with a blank expression.

and I contrasted in my mind this hustling activity, this strained efficiency with the pitiable weakness in the intellectual conception of the conflict, and I understood that the man had been essentially right, that our journeys were in excess of our achievements.

Our life was an inept play with some disproportionately good acting in it.

Then, as I dreamed away, I heard Fanny Ivanovna talking to somebody in the adjoining coupé. I pulled my door open and I could now hear her voice distinctly. I listened. I was vastly tickled.

As for himself, the Baron wanted to wash his hands of the whole business, to get into the British Army, to renounce his Russian nationality, and get a post somewhere in Persia or Mesopotamia.

It seemed more and more as one lived longer that to get White Russia on her legs was like trying to get a featherbed to stand on end.

Occasionally we would visit the front, and the Admiral would interfere in everything. He would look and shake his head: the pace and method of extermination would appear to him thoroughly inadequate.

He looked out of the window of the car on the vast snow-covered plains stretching all around us and brooded darkly.

“Some people,” said he, “think snow beautiful. I think it idiotic.”

Although technically the presence of Nikolai Vasilievich’s family on our train was but a temporary measure, yet it was recognized by all, through that deeper human instinct that defies illusion, that there was an element of permanence about it that would give points to the …

Those that were not dead, when discovered were finished with the bayonet by the “loyal” troops, amid unspeakable yells. Then they lay still and stiff in horrible attitudes. Men and women would stoop over them, gaze and wonder.

Perhaps there is nothing that brings home so clearly the conviction of the temporary nature of human things as the sight of a dead body.

What a moment since had been a human being with a life and purpose of his own was now an object, like a stone or a stick. …

And the Admiral hates Sir Hugo’s love of detail and exactitude which seems bent on proving to him very clearly and precisely the uncertainty and vagueness of his own position.”

“It is a consolation,” said she, “to think that there are other useless people in the world besides ourselves.⁠ ⁠…”

The snow still fell in heaps as I walked home, and it grew markedly colder, and one felt the onset of winter; while prisoners, it was said, were being killed in prison—noiselessly—out of consideration for the Allies in the city.

Who can convey at all adequately that sense of utter hopelessness that clings to a Siberian winter night?

Wherever else is there to be found that brooding, thrilling sense of frozen space, of snow and ice lost in inky darkness, that gruesome sense of never-ending night, and black despair and loneliness untold, immeasurable?

“Well, what’s there in that?”

“Why,” he explained, “the Great Russians are the only real decent Russians. I am a Great Russian myself.”

I nodded with significance, as if to indicate that this made all the difference in the situation.

We were jolly, exuberant, self-centred and sentimental. I felt distinctly pleased with myself.

I knew not why; that is the secret of good wine.

Some people laughed, others after the manner of the Slav were fain to weep; and outside there raged the snowstorm of a Siberian winter night.

What else do you want?” She said it with just that torturing proportion of smile and earnestness that you could not tell how it was meant: and very likely that was just how it was meant. I remember I ransacked my soul for something stinging.

“You can’t love,” I said. “You’re not a woman; you’re a fish.”

It is unfair to analyse love-reasoning unless in a similar emotional temperature. The dance over, our coats on, we sat and waited for the car, Nina looking rather sulky. … And today what a change the sunshine has wrought!

“Aren’t we supposed to be engaged, though?”

“We’ll marry but divorce at once,” she said, “and live separately, and meet only once a year.”

And then the door opened and Nikolai Vasilievich said somewhat angrily to me: “Either come inside, or go. She’ll catch cold standing here with nothing on.” And as he vanished he rather slammed the door.

“Go in, Nina, or he’ll be angry.”

“Take no notice of him. None of us take any notice of him. That’s why he is angry.”

“Then I’ll go in,” I said. And we both went in, and heard Fanny Ivanovna saying: “Believe me, Sonia, it’s all for the best. If you like, send him a postcard with ‘Good riddance’ on it. That’s all you need say.”

enduring this unsatisfactory present because they believed that this present was not really life at all: that life was somewhere in the future: that this was but a temporary and transitory stage to be spent in patient waiting.

And so they waited, year in, year out, looking out for life: while life, unnoticed, had noiselessly piled up the years that they had cast away promiscuously in waiting, and stood behind them⁠—while they still waited.⁠ ⁠…

What Nikolai Vasilievich actually waited for was best known to himself. His hopes had been built up on the assumption of a sudden recovery of his goldmines, a possibility he connected somehow with political developments in the Far East.

He spoke with the tremor and vehemence of a man who had held his tongue for twenty years. He overwhelmed us with surprise, but he seemed no less overwhelmed himself, flushed and marvelling at what was the matter with him.

“Why I personally object to your meddling in our affairs,” he cried, “is because it implies the impression as if you could manage your own.”

Fearful, flaming words spat from his fiery mouth. “Ireland. India. Egypt.” Etc., etc, etc.

“Why I personally object to your meddling in our affairs,” he cried, “is because it implies the impression as if you could manage your own.” Fearful, flaming words spat from his fiery mouth. “Ireland. India. Egypt.” Etc., etc, etc.

An Admiral contradicted by an adult person not subject to Naval regulations is a man at a disadvantage.

“They are just a pack of damned Bolsheviks, the lot of them, that’s all they are,” said he.

“I wonder,” said the Admiral, “if you have held these views consistently throughout the revolution, if you had always been opposed to our help?”

“Well,” said Kniaz, “when I thought you would back up a moderate democratic party I was at least more hopeful of the issue.”

“Oh, those!” scoffed the Admiral. “They weren’t much good. They did not believe in armies, and fighting, and that sort of thing.”

We felt that the crisis could not last. We waited for an explosion. But it never came. The crisis still dragged on: it lapsed into a perpetual crisis; but the edges blunted. And nothing happened.

Life drags on: a series of compromises.

And we drag along, and try to patch it up … but it won’t. And it won’t break. And nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. Nothing happens. …”

Was she à moi, or wasn’t she? Well, was she? She was. She wasn’t. Oh—how the hell could I know!

The art of living is the ability to subordinate minor motives to major ones.

And it is an unsatisfactory art. You must make up your mind what you want, and when you have made up your mind what you want, you might as well, for the difference it makes to you, have never had a mind to make up.

“Well,” I said quietly, “Kolchak has tried it. Denikin has tried it. Yudenich has tried it. I should give it a rest now.”

“Ah,” he laughed, “all this has merely been a little rehearsal. We shall begin seriously in a year or two. It’s the only way to stop bloodshed.”

He puffed at his heavy cigar and his eyes twitched in the smoke.

“We call him Andrei Andreiech.”

“Oh, just so⁠ ⁠… there is something of you about him⁠ ⁠… something⁠ ⁠… unsubstantial.”

“Nina, come for a walk,” I said.

“I have been three months on the way … three months. Good God, Nina, travelling three months to come and see you—and there! …”

“It was an unusually long journey. You must have been moving very slowly.”

“There!” I went on protestingly, “I chuck Oxford, come all the way to Vladivostok, spend three months on the journey … because … because I love you, and you—”

“There!” I went on protestingly, “I chuck Oxford, come all the way to Vladivostok, spend three months on the journey … because … because I love you, and you—”

“You have a speck of soot on your nose,” she remarked.

“Nina!” I cried laughing, my heart all weeping tears. “Nina!”

“Nina!” I cried laughing, my heart all weeping tears. “Nina!”

“Go and wash your face,” she said, “and then come back again. I’ll wait for you here.”

I gave it up.

“Yes.

But to dwell prematurely on the sadness of one’s death to others, Uncle Kostia, is like asking for money in advance. It’s commercially unsound.

”

You tell yourself: She may think of the quarrel at times, perhaps regret the loss, or be annoyed, or feel hostile. There is then some link between you and her. However small, that is at least something.

Indifference is simply nowhere.

Acting on these lines, my three months’ journey always in my mind, I developed a grievance that outraged my soul. I swore there and then to myself that never again, so long as I lived, would I go to see Nina. That settled it.