We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

“I feel very guilty about it. It’s clear that one should not ‘love for the sake of it’ but ‘love for something’s sake.’ All natural forces should be . .

(in that epoch, children were private possessions).

“And to think: these people ‘loved for the sake of it,’ burning, suffering . . .” Again her eyelids lowered like blinds. “What a ridiculous, spendthrift waste of human energy—don’t you think?”

I only saw her eyes. An idea came to me: aren’t human beings constructed as haphazardly as these ridiculous “apartments”? Human heads aren’t transparent, and their only tiny windows: the eyes.

It is clear: I am sick. I have never had dreams before. They say that for the Ancients, it was absolutely usual and normal to have dreams. Yes, of course, it seems their whole existence was just such a horrific carousel: green, orange, Buddha, sap. But we, here and now, know that dreams are a serious psychic disease. I also know: until now my brain was chronometrically regulated and gleaming, a mechanism without a single speck, but now . . . Yes, particularly now: I feel some kind of foreign body in there, in my brain, like a fine eyelash in the eye—the rest of you doesn’t feel it, but the eye with the eyelash in it can’t forget about it for a second .

“Liberation?” Astounding: the extent to which this criminal instinct is deep-rooted in humankind.

When the velocity of the aero = 0, it doesn’t move; when the freedom of a person = 0, he doesn’t commit crime.

“Then you must go to the doctor right now. You do understand: you are obliged to be healthy—funny that I have to point it out to you.”

Their God didn’t give them anything except an eternal, torturous journey; their God didn’t think up anything more clever than that. And there’s no apparent reason why it sacrificed itself.

His hands were bound with a purple ribbon (an old-fashioned custom: the explanation, apparently, is that in ancient times, when all this was not carried out in the name of the One State, the convicted, understandably, felt it within their rights to resist, and so their hands were usually fettered with chains).

Let it resolve itself mechanically:

But she calmly smoked, calmly looking at me, and carelessly flicked her ash on my pink ticket.

“To destroy the few quickly is more reasonable than to give the many an opportunity to ruin themselves—degeneration

Mind you, I am trying to relay my (abnormal) feelings at the time. Now, as I write this, I realize perfectly well: all this was just as it ought to have been, and he, like every honest cipher, has an equal right to joy. And it would be unjust . . . well, yes, all that is clear.

Jealousy

became glass. I saw into myself, inside.

“At night, all ciphers are obliged to sleep; this is an obligation, just exactly like working during the daytime. Indeed it is necessary in order to work in the daytime.

had a firm belief in myself; I believed that I knew everything in myself. And then . . .

I am recording this only to show how strangely entangled and dislodged human reason—so precise and sharp—can become.

It is the equivalent of you sitting in a chair by your own personal bed, crossing one leg over the other, and, with curiosity, watching yourself, your own self, writhe around on that very bed.

Those two in paradise stood before a choice: happiness without freedom or freedom without happiness; a third choice wasn’t given. They, the blockheads, they chose freedom—and then what? Understandably, for centuries, they longed for fetters. For fetters— you understand? That was the cause of world sorrow. For centuries! Until we figured out how to return to happiness again

Because they guard our non-freedom—that is, our happiness. Those

the worthiest human efforts are those intellectual pursuits that specifically seek the uninterrupted delimiting of infinity, the reduction of infinity into convenient, easily digestible portions—into differentials.

The multiplication table is wiser, more absolute than the ancient God: it never—you understand—it never makes mistakes.

the Guardians are the thorns around the rose, guarding the delicate State Flower from rough contact

And the immortal tragedy He Who Was Late for Work?

they came down to earth; they keep step with us under the strict mechanical March of the Music Factory; their

And to you, my unknown planetary readers, we will come to you, to make your life as divinely rational and exact as ours.

On the corner in the white fog: blood—a slit made with a sharp knife—it was her lips.

All women are lips, all lips. Some are pink and firmly round: a ring, a tender guardrail from the whole world. And then there are these ones: a second ago they weren’t here, and just now—like a knife-slit—they are here, still dripping sweet blood.

A piece of iron probably submits just as joyfully to its unavoidable, precise laws and fastens itself to a magnet. A rock, thrown up, wavers for a second and then falls downward, headlong to the ground. And a man, after his agony, exhaling finally, for the last time, dies.

poured myself into her. There was no pink ticket, there were no calculations, there was no One State, there was no me.

“Well, now, fallen angel. You, I’d say, are now lost. You’re not afraid, are you . . .? Well, then, goodbye! You will return alone. Right?”

How fulfilled I am! If only you knew how filled to the full I am!

“You are not the same, you are not your former self, you aren’t mine!”

they both might have the same knife in their hands and they are both performing the same action (slitting the throat of a living person)—and yet one is a benefactor and the other, a criminal, one is a + sign and the other is a - sign . .

I can see: the Integral is contemplating its great and terrifying future, its heavy cargo of inescapable happiness, which it will carry up there, up to you, the unknown, you, who eternally search and never find. You will find you will be happy—you are obliged to be happy—and you haven’t much longer to wait.

saw: people below, bending, straightening, turning, like the levers of one enormous machine, on the beat, rhythmically and rapidly, according to Taylorist mechanics.

And here I was, shoulder to shoulder, fused with them, carried away by the steel tempo . . . Rhythmical movements; firm, round, ruddy cheeks; foreheads, mirror-smooth, not clouded by the folly of a single thought. I swam through the mirrored sea. I relaxed.

She flashed past and for a second filled this yellow, empty world.

“How awful for you! By the looks of it, you’ve developed a soul.”

From the boundless green ocean behind the Wall, a wild tidal surge of roots, flowers, twigs, leaves was rolling toward me, standing on its hind legs, and had it flowed over me I would have been transformed from a person—from the finest and most precise of mechanisms—into . . .

Mankind ceased to be wild beast when it built its first wall.

Mankind ceased to be savage when we built the Green Wall, when we isolated our perfect, machined world, by means of the Wall, from the irrational, chaotic world of the trees, birds, animals . .

And, like children, you will only swallow this bitter thing I am giving you if it is thoroughly coated with a thick adventuresome syrup.

This finger is me. And the strangest, most unnatural thing of all is that the finger doesn’t want to be on the hand, with the others, at all. It wants to be alone, like (oh, all right, I have nothing left to hide), it either wants to be alone or to be with that woman again, pouring my whole self into her through our shoulders or the interlaced fingers of our hands . .