On silence, fragments, and the impossibility of knowing another person — in the shadow of Chekhov’s way of seeing.
By Michael Cummins, Editor, November 2, 2025
He goes into the study after the funeral, searching for some trace of the man he knew only in outline. What he finds is not explanation, nor confession, nor clarity—but a life recorded in fragments, and left deliberately unresolved.
“Let us learn to look at life as it is.”
—Anton Chekhov
After the funeral, when the house had emptied itself of voices, when the door had closed behind the last pair of careful, sympathetic hands, he found himself standing before the study door. The afternoon light had thinned into something resembling evening, though it was not yet late. The hallway was quiet in a way that felt unnatural, as if sound itself were waiting to see what he would do.
He did not touch the door at first. He only stood, looking at the grain of the wood, as though some trace of the man’s hands might still be there. He realized he was expecting something — not revelation, exactly, but atmosphere. Some echo of what people call genius. As if the room should contain a residue of meaning.
He had once overheard a scholar in Petersburg refer to this space as “the sanctum of a century’s clearest witness.” The phrase embarrassed him now. Sanctum implied intent. Purpose. Sacrality. But the man who had lived here had not been interested in making a monument of himself. He had walked through life without insisting he was doing anything remarkable.
He opened the door.
The room was smaller than he remembered. A coat hung over the back of a chair, not neatly, simply left there, as if the owner might return at any moment. A physician’s satchel sat open on the floor beside the desk, a few instruments still inside. And there was the smell of iodine, faint but persistent — the smell of work done quietly, repeatedly, unremarked. The man had been a doctor before he had been anything else. Before writer, before figure, before name.
The desk was unadorned. No staged quills. No ceremonious arrangement of papers. A window stood slightly open, letting in a draft that moved the curtain just enough to suggest breath. The tide could be heard faintly in the distance, the sea’s slow inhalation and release.
He sat. The chair complained softly under him.
The notebooks were in the drawer. Not alphabetized. Not dated. Not arranged in any way that suggested they were meant to be read, let alone interpreted. Just stacked, tied with string the way one ties onions or parcels of bread.
He untied the first cord.
The pages opened easily, as if they had never been closed.
No preface. No remark of intention. No authorial claim.
Only observations.
.
“Evening sky over Taganrog. Grey like unpolished tin. Children running in the dust where a garden should be.”
“A clerk with a cracked watch he checks though it no longer runs.”
“A woman on the shoreline, arranging stones by size, then sweeping the arrangement away with her sleeve.”
“A patient says she hears God at night. Says he sounds like someone in the next room.”
Not stories. Not drafts of stories. Only fragments. Hints. Impressions before interpretation.
He felt a strange unease rise in him.
He had believed, for years, that somewhere there must exist an origin. A place where art began and could be understood. He had imagined that genius was a kind of flame: illuminating, coherent, replicable. Something a devoted student might absorb, if attentive enough. The notebooks seemed to say otherwise. There was no flame, no method. Only weather — passing conditions observed without commentary.
He turned a page.
.
From Greece:
“The Parthenon at dawn. Hard light. A dog asleep under the columned shadow. The tourists speak in low voices as if language itself might offend the ruins.”
In the margin, a sketch: a line of broken capitals, more suggested than drawn.
From the Italian coast:
“The sea does not dramatize. It simply arrives.”
From the northern lakes of Canada:
“Silence is not the absence of sound. It is the possession of stillness.”
From a beach not far from here:
“I walked until the tide erased my footprints. No revelation. No metaphor. Only relief.”
No attempt to make meaning. Only experience recorded, then left alone.
He remembered a summer afternoon in the orchard behind the house. They had been walking slowly — not talking. His father had paused to watch a woman hanging laundry on a line. The woman worked without hurry, stretching each sheet, clipping it carefully, smoothing it with a flat palm. He had watched her a long time. The younger man had waited, expecting a remark of comparison or irony — some literary insight.
Instead, the old man said only:
“She’s doing it beautifully.”
The younger man had waited for more. There was no more.
At the time, he had thought it insufficient. Now he understood: it was everything.
To witness without claiming. To see without needing to say what seeing meant.
He returned to the notebook.
The next pages were different. Shorter. Less stable. The handwriting irregular.
.
“I do not believe in progress. I believe in kindness.”
Two pages later:
“Kindness is a luxury. I am tired of pretending otherwise.”
There were no arrows, no corrections, no indication of which belief was intended to stand. They existed beside each other like two weather systems passing through the same sky.
He realized suddenly — sharply — that the contradiction was not a flaw.
It was the man.
People speak as though a person has a self. Singular. Consistent. But here was evidence — clear, patient, incontrovertible — that the self is a pattern of shifting conditions. A tide. A temperature. A movement of pressure through air.
He felt something tighten in his chest.
What had he been hoping to find in these notebooks? Instruction? Explanation? A map?
He had wanted the old man to tell him what life meant. But the old man had refused — not out of withholding, but out of humility. He did not believe he had the authority to interpret life, not even his own.
Disease had taught him to write in brief strokes. The body decided the sentence length. Breath became punctuation. The economy of the notebooks was not aesthetic. It was physiological.
He turned more pages, slower now.
.
A note on medicine:
“A patient asks how long she has. I tell her the truth. She thanks me. I do not feel merciful. I feel like a door someone has walked through.”
A note on art:
“Do not try to be original. Try to be accurate.”
A note on death:
“It is not frightening. It is simply unfamiliar.”
And once:
“I will not leave a legacy. I will leave a trail.”
The younger man closed the notebook, fingers still holding its edges.
He sat without moving.
The room made no attempt to comfort him.
He thought of the world outside this house. Its insistence on explanation. Its hunger for narrative closure. Here, grief must be processed. Trauma must be named. Identity must be coherent. The self must be presented, defended, displayed.
If he wrote what he had read here, if he showed these notebooks to the world, someone would ask:
But what does it mean?
And they would be unable to bear the answer:
Nothing.
Or everything.
Which is the same thing.
He thought suddenly of something his father had said once — not in instruction, but in passing.
“The mistake is believing meaning is something hidden. Meaning is simply what you have not yet noticed.”
He stood.
He tied the notebooks again, gently. Not to close them, but to return them to the state in which they had been left. Unfinished. Ongoing.
He opened the window wider. The sea could be heard more clearly now — that slow, patient breathing of the world continuing whether one attends to it or not. The curtain lifted, then fell, then lifted again. The room exhaled.
From here, he could see the path that led down to the water.
He remembered the beetle on the garden path years ago. How his father had paused to watch it move. How neither of them had spoken. How nothing had needed to be said.
He did not feel closer to the man.
He felt closer to the silence the man had trusted.
He remained standing a long time, looking out the open window, listening to the slow rhythm of the tide.
No revelation.
No conclusion.
Only the world, continuing.
Unfinished.
THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI