BurtLaw's Daily Quotes

BurtLaw's Daily Quotes
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Moscow, March, 1886

To His Brother Nikolay (Nikolay, an aspiring artist, created the cover of Chekhov's first volume of stories. Nikolay died of consumption two years after Chekhov wrote this letter.)

....Cultured people must, in my opinion, meet the following conditions:

1. They respect human personality, and for this reason they are always affable, gentle, civil, and ready to give in to others. They do not raise a rumpus over a hammer or a lost eraser; when they live with you they do not make you feel that they are doing you a favor....They overlook noise, cold, overdone meat, jokes, the presence of strangers in their rooms.

2. They are sorry not only for beggars and cats. Their hearts ache over what the naked eye does not see...They sit up nights in order to help family, to keep their brothers at the university, and to buy clothes for their mother.

3. They respect the property of others and therefore pay their debts.

4. They are candid, and dread lying as they dread fire. They do not lie even about trifles. A lie insults the listener and debases him in the eyes of the speaker. They do not pose; they behave in the street as they do at home; they do not show off before their inferiors. They do not chatter and do not force uninvited confidences on others. Out of respect for the ears of other people they often keep silent.

5 They do not belittle themselves to arouse com-passion in others. They do not play on other people's heart-strings so as to elicit sighs and be fussed over. They do not say: "People don't understand me" or "I have frittered away my talent," because all that is striving after cheap effect; it is vulgar, stale, false.

6. They are not vain. They do not care for such paste diamonds as familiarity with celebrities, the handclasp of the drunken gadfly, the raptures of a stray spectator in a picture gallery, popularity in beer-halls....When they have done a kopeck's worth of work they do not strut about as though they had done a hundred rubles' worth, and they do not brag of having the entrance where others are not admitted. The truly talented always keep in the shade, among the crowd, far from the show. Even Krylov said that an empty barrel is noisier than a full one.

7. If they possess talent they respect it. They sacrifice peace, women, wine, vanity to it. They are proud of their talent; they are aware that their calling is Rot just to live with people but to have an educative influence on them. Besides they are fastidious.

8. They develop their esthetic sense. They cannot fall asleep in their clothes, see the cracks in the wall full of insects, breathe foul air, walk on a spittle-covered floor, eat from a pot off a kerosene stove. They seek as far as possible to tame and ennoble the sexual instinct. What they want from a woman is not a mere bed-fellow, not equine sweat, not a cleverness that shows itself in the ability to seduce and to lie incessantly. What they need, especially if they are artists, is freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for being not a mere ornament....They do not swill vodka at all hours. They do not sniff about cupboards, for they are not pigs. They drink only when they are free, on occasion....

And so on. That is what cultivated people are like....

A. Chekhov

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Announcement. We've finally gotten around to launching our new webzine/blawg: BurtLaw's The Daily Judge:

It is not an online newspaper and is not affiliated with or intended to be mistaken for any existing or previously-existing newspaper or journal. Rather, it is a so-called "blawg," a law-related personal "web log" or "blog," one with a subjective, idiosyncratic, and eccentric sociological and social-psychological slant that focuses not on the latest judicial decisions of supposed great importance but on a) the institution of judge in the United States and in other countries throughout the world, b) the judicial office and role, c) judicial personalities, d) the great common law tradition of judging as practiced here and throughout the world, e) judges as judges, f) judges as ordinary people with the usual mix of virtues and flaws, etc. We link to newspapers and other sources in order to alert the reader to ideas, articles, stories, speeches, law books, literary works and other things about "judges" that have interested us and that may interest the reader.

We don't promote our blawgs, but readers of this blog and of our affiliated political opinion blog, BurtonHanson.Com, may be interested in it. We don't think there is another blawg quite like it.