In "The Bet," considering the behavior of the lawyer during his imprisonment, how would you explain the content of his note?

The lawyer was not a particularly well-educated man at the time he made the bet with the banker. He had probably devoted most of his collegiate years to studying law, which is an intricate, demanding subject and would require most of his attention. Then when he found himself a prisoner who had to do without human companionship for fifteen years, he naturally turned to reading to pass the time and occupy his mind. No doubt he was very intelligent, but like a lot of men who specialize in a profession such as medicine, law, engineering, or accounting, he had probably given little thought to such matters as philosophy, art or religion. Many doctors and other professionals discover in middle age that they have missed something very important in life while pursuing success in a practical profession. It is significant that the lawyer did not ask the banker to provide him with any law books. The lawyer seems to be compensating for the one-sided nature of his education. His incarceration is an opportunity in disguise. He has nothing but time. He can study what others have had to say about the questions that would naturally occur to an intelligent person in his position. 

What we read shapes our minds. If we read trash, it is inevitable that our minds will be weak and unfocused. According to the narrator, the lawyer read frivolous books for a short time but then spent many years studying the most abstruse and serious books in the world's literature.

In the second half of the sixth year the prisoner began zealously studying languages, philosophy, and history. He threw himself eagerly into these studies—so much so that the banker had enough to do to get him the books he ordered. In the course of four years some six hundred volumes were procured at his request.

It would be impossible to understand how all this reading shaped the lawyer's mind without reading those six hundred books—and one might have to be sentenced to solitary confinement in order to have the time and the motivation to focus on them the way the lawyer did. It is significant that after reading all those books he turned his attention to the gospels in the New Testament, as if the sum and substance of human wisdom could be encapsulated in the teaching of Jesus.

Jesus had no use for worldly goods. He taught that a person could reach the "Kingdom of heaven" and attain immortality here on earth through prayer and meditation. This seems to have been the lawyer's view at the end of the story. It explains why he wrote the letter which he left for the banker as he was about to forfeit the bet by breaking the seal on the door of lodge where he had spent fifteen years as a prisoner and disappearing during the night. Ironically, he agreed to spend fifteen years in solitary confinement because he coveted that two million rubles, and at the end of the fifteen years he didn't even want to collect them.