Anton Chekhov - The Collected Stories

A collection available here.

During the coming year, I wish to read all of Chekhov's stories available on Project Gutenberg. I have read him in different collections, some famous ones, some not so famous ones over years and decades. But this desire now to read all the stories that are available easily - from the beginning of the above collection. 

For me, reading short stories takes time. One can only read so much in a day. It is like a cup of coffee. One opens up a story, gets involved with it, and after reading it, keeps thinking about it for a while. One can only have so many cups of coffee in a day. In another analogy I often think of a book of short stories as an artist's gallery of sketches while a novel as a single painting. Even though the number of pages may be the same, it takes much longer to read a collection of short stories in terms of mindspace. 

Excited about this new project for the coming year. Plan to drop in notes here and there whenever a story makes an impression. 

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At the moment, it is the second story, Ward No. 6. Much written about and often referred to, this story is about the mental patients ward, and their doctor and how in the way humanity works in a group, some truths which are not objective are never discovered, but rather voted or afeared. The problems of drawing attention, the closing circles where any argument either way draws the circle tighter and tighter around the self. 

But most of all that life is such a gradient. The way we live makes life look static, 1 and 0, while so much of life, nature and reality operates on gradient. Just that our flight/fight mind finds it simpler to operate while regarding the world as rigid static, while the world is anything but. Reality floats, flows, changes, while we operate as if the world stays the same forever. So goes for the sane and insane in the story... makes you wonder. 

Reminds me of the Bell Jar, and Plath's heroine's grappling of sanity and insanity. This narrow band of normalcy for the social human on one end, while on the other end is the changing, shifting human, which as long as it doesn't draw attention to its not-normal moments can be regarded as sane and normal. It is the bigger question of human way of being, while the reality resides in the zones of becoming, ever-changing, ever-fluid.

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