The Man Who Climbed Out of the Cave

A man I know recommended Chekhov’s “The Bet” to me the other day. He added his own summary. Everything in life was meaningless and empty, money meant nothing, and so we might as well go live in a cave, where dinner would depend on his catlike hunting skills. I laughed. I will admit the cat part really got me. But the line stayed with me longer than I expected, partly because I have heard versions of it many times, and partly because the story he chose says almost the opposite.

For those who haven’t read it, Chekhov wrote it in 1889. At a dinner party, a banker and a young lawyer argue over whether the death penalty is crueler than life imprisonment. The lawyer says he would choose prison over death any day. The banker bets two million rubles that he couldn’t last fifteen years in solitary confinement. The lawyer accepts, and he actually does it. He plays the piano at first, then reads novels, then languages, philosophy, history, the Gospels, theology. Years pass. Near the end he writes the banker a letter saying that everything people chase is a mirage, that he despises all of it, and that he renounces the money. Five hours before the deadline he climbs out the window and disappears.

It is tempting to read this as the moment a man becomes wise. When I was younger, I read it that way myself. Now when I read the letter I hear something colder. This is a man who spent fifteen years without seeing a single human face, only books, and who ended up judging all of humanity without having touched anyone in all that time. What he reaches is contempt, and Chekhov lets us feel how thin it is. The banker, reading the letter, is not inspired. He is disgusted with himself, goes to bed and weeps. The story is less about whether life is empty and more about two men foolish enough to gamble fifteen years of a life on a point of pride. So if you ask me, the cave was never the answer in that story. It was the very thing that broke the lawyer.

Whenever I think about this story I find myself in Kohelet. Havel havalim, hakol havel. We usually translate it as “vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” and it sounds like a verdict. But hevel does not really mean emptiness. It means breath. Vapor. The little cloud that leaves your mouth on a cold morning and is gone before you can point at it. Kohelet is not telling us life is meaningless. He is telling us it does not last and cannot be held, which is a very different thing. You don’t cling to something meaningless. Something fleeting, on the other hand, you hold more carefully precisely because you know it is going.

The same book says something the lawyer never wrote in his letter. Two are better than one, because if one falls, the other lifts him up. Woe to the one who is alone when he falls.

There is a teaching of the Arizal I keep coming back to here. Before anything could exist, the Infinite drew itself inward, opened a space, withdrew so that something other than itself could be. Tzimtzum. Creation does not begin with fullness. It begins with making room. I have always found that moving, because it means the very first act of existence was, in a sense, relational. What is complete and alone creates nothing. Meaning seems to live, almost always, in the space two beings open for each other.

The sociologist in me arrives at the same place through a different door. Meaning is not a stone you dig out of your own chest. It is built between people, in a shared language, a shared memory, in promises made and kept. Durkheim called it anomie, the loss of direction that sets in when a person’s ties to others come loose. The lawyer in the story is an almost perfect case. He read everything, spoke to no one, and in the end knowledge closed the world to him instead of opening it.

What makes me smile is Chekhov’s own life. He was a doctor. On his estate at Melikhovo he treated peasants without charging them, and during the cholera outbreak of 1892 he volunteered as a district physician. He built schools. Already ill with the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him, he traveled thousands of kilometers to the penal colony on Sakhalin, went from hut to hut taking a census of the prisoners and settlers, and then wrote a book about what he saw. Whatever he thought about meaninglessness, he did not live like a man who believed in it.

I have come to think that saying “life is empty” is often less a philosophy than a shelter. If you don’t take the world seriously, it cannot hurt you much. I understand the appeal, honestly. In my work I meet it often, usually in people who have been disappointed one time too many. But the braver thing, and the harder one, is to know that everything is as fleeting as a breath and to love life anyway, and to share that breath with someone.

In the first chapters of Bereshit, God looks at everything He has made and calls it good. The first thing He calls not good is a single condition. Lo tov heyot ha’adam levado. It is not good for the human to be alone.

Whenever that cave proposal comes to mind, I still smile. Chekhov’s lawyer got out of there in the end. We don’t know where he went, but I am sure he did not go back to solitude.