The Joy of Figures, Sans Faces or Fingers

“What is the matter with you?”

“Oh, don’t ask! I never expected it; no, I never expected it! It’s… it’s positively incredible!”

— Anton Chekov, Joy, 1877

I’m reading Chekov’s Joy while I reckon with my own.

Saturday, 23 November

Under protest, I find myself in a drawing class.
I have been wickedly tricked.

Avvai, knowing that I want to learn, asked if I’d go with her. Ania (our teacher), clearly also a trickster, has made this first class a pure delight, so as to trick me into coming back! So tricked have I been that I am signing up for six weeks!

Saturday, 30th November

Today was the second class and now Ania has revealed her true character!… She really is a delight! She says I’m a good student, which is a first for me. I have always been an archetypally bad student.

I’ve always wanted to draw and, like a billion silly buggers before me, I’ve always said that “I can’t”. Cy was best at setting me straight when I said things like that, but he has the interminable habit of living on the far side of the blue marble. Helen and Irfaan lured me out of another daft mantra, “can’t learn a language”. Kyle and Avvai are hard at work on a couple more.

Many thanks to all the patient folk, mentioned and unmentioned, who coax and cajole me, stubborn as I am, into living better and better, brighter and brighter.

While “at first in an unconscious condition, [those silly ideas in] his head turned out not to be serious. [artistic] aid was given to the injured man [… who then] put on his cap with its cockade and, joyful and triumphant, ran into the street.”

[He] laughed and sank into an armchair, so overcome by happiness that he could not stand on his legs.

“It’s incredible! You can’t imagine! Look!”

Anton Chekoc, Joy, 1877, translated by Constance Garnett