DEEP LAKE OF FEELING IN THE BUCKET

HE WOULD NEVER SPEAK TO THEM EXCEPT IN PARABLES. MATT 13:34

OR HOW THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD IS A MODEL 
FOR THE GREATEST SHORT STORY EVER WRITTEN

The use of parables is itself one of the mysteries of  the message in the New Testament. Jesus chose to tell stories and to allow  for  each listener to find his or her way into the stories at whatever level of understanding  he or she possessed. I find this when I read the story of the PRODIGAL SON. 
Another story that  resonates is the one about how the seed is cast on different  types of ground. Or the one about how the man  who is hired in the last hour of the day is paid as much as the workers hired at dawn. What is going on here?  The stories do not change so it must be that the reader is changing. 
 This is shown when you read  and then years later  return to the same story and it unfolds its meaning in a new and different light.  I must say that this is true of literature written by great writers like Shakespeare.  When I first read King Lear I thought it was a story about three daughters,  And later I saw that it was about not knowing who loves you. Now I find  reading it  to be unbearable, because I see that it is a profound exposure of the vulnerability and  helplessness and  oncoming madness of the aged. Because that is where I am now.

I  have found that some writers do see that their characters have  what I am calling a "deep lake of feeling." Chekhov is particularly adept at showing that deep lake that  surprises the very person that   embodies it. Because we all possess this deep lake of feeling, it is actually setting the hidden agendas of our lives and the mysterious motions of our pilgrimage here on earth. We read these stories and revere them without fully understanding why they speak to us so  profoundly.

I saw this when I taught a little short story by  Chekhov  "The Lady with the Dog" It is the story of how two married people meet at Yalta and begin an adulterous affair. This  act of treachery actually exposes the emptiness of their home lives; it is the beginning of their first authentic love experience.

'Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountaintops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, crickets chirped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea, rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now; and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings—the sea, mountains, clouds, the wide open sky—Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our 
existence."

Chekhov frames a recognition which is the story's epiphany that we are  in an" unceasing progress towards perfection". And that  for him  is the "pledge of eternal salvation."

When I read this story and  when I tried to  penetrate its meaning in the classroom I do recall that  I was haunted by it. I knew that it contained a  deep truth about the depth of human feeling that we only rarely  access in our lives.  Extremes can show it to us--the death of a mother or the birth of our child or the death of a lover--these events shake us and  sometimes propel us forward in unplanned and unforeseen ways.

I do know that I often taught this story because it rewarded returning to it and students had  an intense reaction. It haunted me and I knew that it was a great short story.
So it did not surprise me when  I read recently that Nabokov considered it the greatest short story ever written."  I am sure Nabokov has read more than I and I happily accept his judgement  since it validates mine.