The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York Review Books Classics)

by Victor Serge

Perhaps the deepest source is the feeling that marvelous life is passing, flying, slipping inexorably away and the desire to detain it in flight. It was this desperate feeling that drove me, around the age of sixteen, to note the precious instant, that made me discover that existence (human, “divine”) is memory. Later, with the enrichment of the personality, one discovers its limits, the poverty and the shackles of the self, one discovers that one has only one life, an individuality forever circumscribed, but which contains many possible destinies, and … mingles … with the other human existences, and the earth, the creatures, everything. Writing then becomes a quest of poly-personality, a way of living diverse destinies, of penetrating into others, of communicating with them … of escaping from the ordinary limits of the self … (Doubtless there are other kinds of writers, individualists, who only seek their own self-assertion and can’t see the world except through themselves.)