THE GAMBLER: Short, sharp little story from Dostoyevsky. It made me think about the attraction of gambling–the narrator describes the way his heart would start pounding and his thoughts racing when he was still rooms away from the roulette wheels, as soon as he could first hear their clatter. I don’t really know what the fun is, since I’ve never gambled (I’ve bet on various events, but it’s not the same thing). The Gambler made it seem like a big part of the thrill is the knowledge that you’re committing an irrevocable act. The very fact that we can commit irrevocable acts is fascinating–it’s incredibly frightening, and is one reason Nietzsche hammered so hard on the idea that forgetting is necessary for happiness. To commit an irrevocable and possibly insanely stupid or evil act for no reason is thrilling because of our desires for self-destruction, and because it’s an ambiguous act that can be either an attempt to lose the self or an assertion of the self (because you’re not risking all this money for anything outside the self, you’re risking it just because you “want to”). All of this is rank speculation on my part, and only applicable to the narrator of The Gambler rather than to gamblers in regular reality; I’m trying to tease out the reasons that I identified so strongly with his thrills and compulsions even though, like I said, I don’t gamble at all.
For the really committed gambler in Dostoyevsky’s book, the risk has to be big–so big that it might change your life–and it has to be undertaken almost at random, at whim. There’s an attraction to fatalism, a desire to believe that one is out of control of one’s own life, a flight from responsibility and into the realm of destiny and moira.