Status Updates From Ward No. 6: Anton Chekhov’s...

“However magnificent the dawn that will illumine your life, in the end you'll still be nailed down in your coffin and thrown into a pit.'”

“He visits the hospital about twice a week, inspects the wards and sees out-patients. The total lack of antiseptics and cupping-glasses worries him, but he doesn't introduce any changes for fear of upsetting Ragin, whom he considers an old rogue, suspects of being a man of means and secretly envies. He would love to have Ragin's job.”

“'I'm serving a harmful cause,' he thinks, 'and I receive a salary from those I deceive. So I'm dishonest. But then I'm nothing by myself, just a mere particle in a necessary social evil. All the district officials are crooks and they get paid for doing nothing means it's not myself who is guilty of dishonesty, but the times we live in If I were to be born two hundred years from now I'd be a different person.'

“It is just as strange to seek immortality in the transmutation of matter as predicting a brilliant future for the case after a valuable violin has been smashed and rendered useless.'

2/2 “Merely for him to grow cold and be whirled around there was absolutely no need to draw man – with his sublime, almost divine intellect - out of nothingness and then to turn him into clay, as if in mockery.”

1/2 “Oh, why isn't man immortal?' he asks himself. 'Why these cerebral cortices and convolutions, why vision, speech, sensation, genius, if all are doomed to pass into the soil and finally grow cold with the earth's crust and then to be borne for millions of years with the earth around the sun, without rhyme or reason?”

“All these prejudices, abominations and foul living conditions were necessary, since in the course of time they would be converted into something useful, like manure into fertile soil. There was nothing good in this world that did not contain some abomination in its earliest beginnings.”

“Ragin concluded that It was an immoral institution, highly injurious to the health of its patients. In his opinion it would be best to discharge the patients and close the hospital. But, he reasoned, will-power alone was not sufficient to achieve this… Therefore one should wait until it disappeared of its own accord. Besides, if people opened a hospital and tolerated it, that could only mean they needed it.”

ولولا الآلام لأصبحت فارغة تماماً كحياة الأميبا ..

وليس هناك في الدنيا شيء طيب إلا وكان فيه شيء حقير في أصله