On What Solitude Can Do
In Chekhov’s short story The Bet, the young lawyer’s studious use of 15 years in solitude enabled him to recognize the superficiality and ephemerality of much of human affairs. He says: “You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty… To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by, I renounce the two million of which I once dreamed as of paradise and which now I despise.”
His position is a contemptus mundi, a disdain for the foolishness of human ways. (Note: this is not contempt for human beings, nor is it a rejection of anything good, wise, or beautiful in human life; rather, it’s a repudiation of folly. He doesn’t say that he despises people; rather, he rejects what they live by.* One might also call this a contemptus saeculi.)
*There is a crucial distinction between (a) a person and (b) that person’s beliefs, practices, values, etc. It seems to me that, these days, folks have much trouble making this distinction, and thus mistake a rejection of one’s beliefs, etc. as a rejection of the person who holds those beliefs, etc. Because they struggle to make they trip into a mistake.