Vershinin: Treating of ... can we not “daydream,“ as it were, of what life will be in three hundred years.
Tuzenbach: Immediately. People will move in hot air balloons. Fashions will change. We will see the discovery and the development of the Sixth Sense... Life will remain the same. Dark. Full of mysteries. Dark. Difficult. Unhappy. In a thousand years, too. … Man, man will sigh the same way and exclaim “Oh, Lord, I do not understand. It’s so hard.” Just as now. And fear death. And yearn to live. Exactly as now.
Vershinin: … but it is not, for it seems to me that it is, that change, and that the process of changing, alters every aspect of our life, little by little … so that, in accumulation, you see, in two or three hundred, in a thousand years – no, the date is not the point. At some time… life will have changed. How can we say that it will not – as it is changing now? – into a new, a happy life – a life of betterment. Not that we live to see it, for we will not, but that now, in our suffering, in our philosophizing, in our lives we are creating it. And this, this is the purpose of our being – this, if you will, is our happiness.
Anton Chekhov. Three sisters