Sunday night, and I finally open The Cherry Orchard. It is on the World Literature list I stare at two days ago and do not close. Chekhov. A house, a family, and an orchard they love so much they would rather lose everything than cut it down.
I think it will be about trees. It is about money, which annoy me at first and then feel honest.
The family come home after years away. The orchard is famous, even beautiful, and it do not pay. A man who used to be poorer than they are have a plan: divide the land, build summer houses, sell them. The family find this vulgar. They talk about the past as if talking is a kind of payment. Meanwhile the debt sit there, not listening.
In Business we have a colder name for this. An asset is supposed to be useful, or to be sold. If you keep something because it remind you of your childhood, that is not stupid, but it is also not a plan. Opportunity cost again: every year they keep the orchard as a memory, they do not keep the house as a house. I feel disloyal writing that sentence, because I also have things I will not sell. A sketchbook. The music box from June. They are not an estate, and nobody is coming to auction them. That is the difference, and Chekhov know it.
What I cannot stop noticing is how people in the play speak past the problem. They have parties. They lose a purse. They remember a mother walking the rows of white trees. The merchant keep repeating the maths, not unkindly, and they treat him as if maths is a lack of feeling. I do not think he is the villain. I also do not think love of trees is the villain. The play is uncomfortable because both things can be true at once, and still the bank will not accept a feeling as a payment.
This is the same argument as the rose, in a way, except Wilde make it a bird and Chekhov make it a whole childhood. Price is what someone will pay for the land. Value is what the family think the orchard is. Those two numbers never meet, so the story have to end with an axe. I have not reach the end yet. I already know the sound.
I am sixteen, and I want study finance, which sound like choosing the merchant. I do not want to be the person who only see summer houses. I also do not want to be the person who talk beautifully while the roof is sold. Maybe the point of reading this now, before school is fully noisy again, is to practise holding both. The orchard is real. The debt is real. A good sentence do not cancel a bad balance sheet.
I should sleep. Tomorrow I have to be a student again, not a landowner. I will read the next act on the bus, which is a smaller orchard, but it is the one I actually have.