Sometimes you’re lucky enough to be reading something just when you need it. Or maybe it’s just that you read into it what you need to get out of it.
In The Black Monk, scholar and philosopher Andrey Vail’ich Kovrin, Master of Arts, is spending time with an old man and his daughter who place the orchard garden as the most important thing in the old man’s world, but whose high esteem for Kovrin allows him to encourage a marriage between his daughter and Kovrin as the least likely son-in-law to let the garden fall into disrepair and ruin after the old man’s death.
Kovrin is happy; he studies, he writes, he enjoys the beauty of the garden and he cares deeply for the old man and his daughter. He even tells her about a dream or memory of a legend of the black monk, though when it appears to him, he says nothing, fearing they will all think him mad. The monk convinces Kovrin that he is creative and a genius, and that he is one of the chosen few who are seek out the eternal truth through reason and beauty. Kovrin is able to enjoy all facets of his life until his wife notices him in discussion with the phantom monk and he is declared mentally diseased and treated with medications that dampen his whole being into mediocrity. A mediocrity, it is to be noted, that those around him happily accept, but which Kovrin finds abhorrent and soon he hates life and all those around him.
“Why, why do you make me have this cure? All sorts of bromatic preparations, idleness, warm baths, watching, poor-spirited, alarm for every mouthful, for every step–all this in the end will make a perfect idiot of me. I went mad, I had the mania of greatness, but for all that I was gay, healthy, and even happy; I was interesting and original. Now I have become more sober-minded and matter-of-fact, but in consequence, I am now like everybody else. I am mediocre, life is tiresome to me…”
Is the monk a metaphor for ego, self-confidence, creativity? So very much can be made of this simple story and its application to the social ways of the present. I wonder about the insistence that no one is superior, that we are all ‘special’; everyone is an artist, a writer, a poet. Often this is openly done by minimizing the value of the talented (many universities and high schools have dropped the valedictorian designation). Instead of setting higher standards of achievement, standards are lowered so that more people can claim achievement.
Even as Kovrin’s wife and father-in-law praised him, they did not manage to elevate his own self-esteem to the point of keeping him productive; the old man saw Kovrin more as insurance that his own accomplishments–the garden–would be safeguarded and maintained. The daughter saw him as a husband mentally and physically far superior to the local young men who wooed her.
I also find interesting Chekhov’s reference to the medications and means that are employed to change Kovrin’s mental state to one more ‘normal’ in their society. Kovrin realizes it has all dulled him into a mediocrity that is just like everyone else. Are we throwing this same water on the fires of creative difference of ideas by our insistence on drugs to combat what we’ve termed ADD or ADHD.
Are we, in our pursuit of equality and normalcy for all, turning ourselves into mere mediocrity?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology