Yevgeny Zamyatin

“Sizler, tanımadığım okurlarım, sizler bize oranla muhtemelen çocuksunuz (sonuçta bizim arkamızda TekDevlet var ve haliyle insan için en mümkün en yüksek doruklara erdik). Ve tıpkı çocuklar gibi, acı şeyleri ancak tatlı ve kalın bir macerayla kaplayıp verirsem yutacaksınız.”

“It's clear: if there is no good reason for enviousness, the denominator of the fraction of happiness is brought to zero and the fraction is transformed into a glorious infinity.”

“You're afraid of it because it's stronger than you, you hate it because you're afraid of it, you love it because you can't master it. You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.”

“Paradise,’ he began, and the p meant a spray. ‘The old legend about Paradise—that was about us, about right now. Yes! Just think about it. Those two in Paradise, they were offered a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness, nothing else. Those idiots chose freedom. And then what? Then for centuries they were homesick for the chains. That’s why the world was so miserable, see? They missed the chains. For ages! And we were the first to hit on the way to get back to happiness. No, wait ... listen to me. The ancient God and us, side by side, at the same table. Yes! We helped God finally overcome the Devil—because that’s who it was that pushed people to break the commandment and taste freedom and be ruined. It was him, the wily serpent. But we gave him a boot to the head! Crack! And it was all over: Paradise was back. And we’re simple and innocent again, like Adam and Eve. None of those complications about good and evil: Everything is very simple, childishly simple —Paradise! The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell, the Guardians: All those things represent good, all that is sublime, splendid, noble, elevated, crystal pure. Because that is what protects our nonfreedom, which is to say, our happiness.”

“Get the paper quick, maybe it's there... I read the paper with my eyes (that's not mistake: My eyes are like a pen now, or a calculator, something you hold in your hands, something you feel is not you- a tool).”

“Do you believe that you will die? Yes, man is mortal, I am a man, ergo... No, that isn't what I mean. I know that you know that. What I'm asking is: Have you ever actually believed it, believe it completely, believe not with your mind but with your body, actually felt that one day the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be yellow and icy...?”

“...And what if you don't wait? You just drive over the edge yourself? Wouldn't that be the only right thing to do, the one that would solve everything?”

“Their mistake was the mistake of Galileo. He was right that the earth revolves around the sun, but he didn't know that the entire solar system revolves around yet another center; he didn't know that the real orbit of the earth, as opposed to the relative orbit, is by no means some naive circle...”

“Children are the only bold philosophers. And bold philosophers will always be children. So you're right, it's a child's question, just as it should be.”

“My dear, you are a mathematician. You're even more, you're a philosopher of mathematics. So do this for me: Tell me the final number.”

“She was like a candle that just went out. All the circles that made her up suddenly got lopsided and warped.”

“Strange- the barometer is falling, but there's no wind yet, just silence. Up there above, where we can't hear it, it's already begun, the storm. The rainclouds are racing along at full speed. There aren't many of them yet- scattered serrated fragments. It's as though some city had fallen up there and now the pieces of the walls and towers are flying down, the heaps of them grow with horrible rapidity before your eyes, and they come closer and closer, but still have days to fly through blue emptiness before they crash down here to the bottom, with us.”

“Besides, I can't, I no longer have the strength to destroy this painful piece of myself, which might turn out to be the piece I value most.”

“A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don't know how it's going to end. Otherwise, there'd be no point in reading...”

“Great Benefactor! How absurd- to want pain! Can there be anyone who doesn't know that pain is a negative quality, and that if you add them up it reduces the sum we call happiness? so it follows...But...nothing follows. The slate is clean. Naked.”

“I'm like a machine being run over its RPM limit: The bearings are overheating - a minute longer, and the metal is going to melt and start dripping and that'll be the end of everything. I need a quick splash of cold water, logic. I pour it on in buckets, but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist. Well, of course, it's clear that you can't establish a function without taking into account what its limit is. And it's also clear that what I felt yesterday, that stupid "dissolving in the universe," if you take it to its limit, is death. Because that's exactly what death is - the fullest possible dissolving of myself into the universe. Hence, if we let L stand for love and D for death, then L = f (D), i.e., love and death...”

“You don't look normal, dear. You look sick. Because sick and not normal are the same thing. You're destroying yourself, and no one is going to tell you that - no one.”

“They say there are flowers that bloom only once every hundred years. Why shouldn't there be some that bloom only once every thousand, every ten thousand years? Maybe we just haven't heard about them up to now because this very day is that once-in-a-thousand-years.”

“In the ancient world, this was understood by the Christians, our only (if very imperfect) predecessors: Humility is a virtue, pride a vice; We comes from God, I from the Devil.”

“For one second I stared at her like all the others as something that had dropped out of nowhere: She was no longer a number, she was simply a person; she existed as nothing more than the metaphysical substance of the insult committed against OneState. But then some one of her movements-turning, she twisted her hips to the left-and all at once I knew: I know her, I know that body resilient as a ship-my eyes, my lips, my hands know it-in one moment I was absolutely sure of it.”

“He plashed away, like paddles on water, toward the door, and every step he made returned to me gradually my feet, my hands, my fingers. My soul again spread equally throughout my body. I was able to breathe.”

“You know... or maybe you don't know... I don't know how to write this-but never mind: Now you know that there will never be a day for me, or a morning, or a springtime, without you. Because for me R is nothing more than... but you don't care about this. At any rate, I'm very grateful to him. I don't know what I would have done, alone, without him, these last few days. During these days and nights I've lived through ten or maybe twenty years. My room has seemed round and not square, and endless, round and round and all the same, with no doors anywhere. I can't live without you-because I love you. because I see. I understand, that you don't need anybody, anybody on earth, except her, that other one, and... look, that's just it, if I love you, then I have to...I just need two or three more days to try and put the pieces of myself back into some semblance of the former O-90-and then I'll go and fill our the form myself, that I'm withdrawing my registration for you, and you'll be better off, you'll be fine. I'll never come again. Goodbye.O.”

“And what is strangest of all, most unnatural of all, is that the finger hasn't got the slightest desire to be on the hand, to be with the others;”

“Do you know this feeling? When you're in an aero speeding up through a blue spiral, the window open, the wind whistling, and there's no earth, you've forgotten the earth, the earth is just as far from you as Saturn or Jupiter or Venus? That's how I'm living now. The wind is in my face and I've forgotten the earth, I've forgotten about dear rosy O. But earth exists all the same, and sooner or later I've got to glide down and land on it and I'm just shutting my eyes to the day on my Sexual Table with O-90's name on it...”

“From a distance a metronome is ticking through the fog, and I mechanically chew to the familiar caress of its music, counting, along with everyone else, up to fifty: fifty statutory chews for each mouthful. And, still mechanically beating out the time, I go downstairs, and, like everyone else, check off my name in the book as one leaving the premises. But I sense that I'm living separately from everyone else, alone, surrounded by a soft, soundproof wall, and that my world is on my side of this wall.”

“I looked for it but I found no way out of this wild logical thicket. This was a tangle every bit as unknown and terrifying as that behind the Green Wall These were creatures just as extraordinary and incomprehensible, and they said as much with no words. I imagined that I saw through some kind of thick class the square root of minus one-infinitely huge and at the same time infinitely small, scorpion-shaped, with that hidden but always sensed sting of the minus sign... But maybe that is nothing except my "soul," like the legendary scorpion of the ancients, which would deliberately sting itself with everything that...”

“I stopped and listened. But all I could hear was.. a kind of thudding, and not in me but somewhere near me... my heart.”

“O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals...”

“What's going on? A soul? Did you say, a soul? What the hell! Next thing you know we'll have cholera again. What did I tell you? [He tossed the thin one on his horns.] I told you so... we should operate on all of them, on the imagination. Extirpate the imagination. Surgery's the only answer... nothing but surgery...”

“Why? But why don't we have feathers? Or Wings? Nothing but the shoulder blades where wings would be attached? Why, because we no longer need wings. We've got aeros. Wings would only be in the way. Wings are for flying, but we have nowhere to fly to, we've already flown there, we've found it.”

“You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul.”

“I felt I hadn't breathed since early morning, that my heart had not beat-and only now for the first time I took a breath, only now the floodgates in my chest opened...”

“Well, fallen angel. Now you're quite ruined," she said, reverting to the formal you. "No, aren't you afraid? Well, goodbye! You'll get back on your own, right?”

“Everything used to revolve around the sun; now I knew it all revolved around me-slowly, blissfully, squinting its eyes.”

“The whole of life, in all its complexity and beauty, has been etched into the gold of words.”

“And how about the "Daily Odes to the Benefactor"? Who can read them without bowing his head reverently before the selfless labor of this Number of Numbers? Or the terrible blood-red beauty of the "Flowers of Judicial Verdicts"? Or the immortal tragedy, "Lat for Work"? Or the bedside book of "Stanzas on Sexual Hygiene"?”

“The only reason I'm writing this down is to show how human reason, even very sharp and exact human reason, can get crazily confused and thrown off the track.”

“O-90 sat over the notebook, her head leaning toward her left shoulder, and making such an effort that her tongue was pushing her left cheek out. She looked like such a child, so charming. And so I felt good all over, clear, simple...”

“But still, how could they write whole libraries about someone like Kant and hardly even notice Taylor-that prophet who could see ten centuries ahead?”

“Now... what I feel these in my brain is just like... some kind of foreign body... like having a very thin little eyelash in your eye. You feel generally okay, but that eye with the last in it-you can't get it off your mind for a second.”

“It was clear: I was sick. I never used to dream. They say in the old days it was the most normal thing in the world to have dreams. Which makes sense: Their whole life was some kind of horrible merry-go-round of green, orange, Buddha, juice. But today we know that dreams point to a serious mental illness. And I know that up to now my brain has checked out chronometrically perfect, a mechanism without a speck of dust.”

“No matter how limited their powers of reason might have been. still they must have understood that living like that was just murder, a capital crime - except it was slow, day-by-day murder. The government (or humanity) could not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time. To kill one man - that is, to subtract 50 years from the sum of all human lives - that was a crime; but to subtract from the sum of all human lives 50,000,000 years - that was not a crime! No, really, isn't it funny? This problem in moral math could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old Number today, but they couldn't solve it. All their Kant's together couldn't solve it (because it never occurred to one of their Kant's to construct a system of scientific ethics - that is, one based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication).”

“We went hand in hand across four lines of avenues. At the corner she was to go right, and I left."I'd like so much to come to your place today and let the blinds down. Today-right this minute" said O, and shyly looked up at me with her round crystal-blue eyes.she's a funny one. But what could I say? She was with me only yesterday, and she knows as well as I do that our next Sex Day is the day after tomorrow. It's just more of her thought getting ahead of itself, like a spark that flies too early in the ignition, which can do some harm at times.Saying goodbye, I kissed her twice-no, I'll tell the truth-three times on those wonderful blue eyes of hers that not the least little cloud ever troubled.”

“...O percurso natural para se passar da nulidade à grandeza é esquecermo-nos de que somos um grama e sentirmos que somos a milionésima parte duma tonelada.”

“But a thought swarmed in me; what if he, this yellow-eyed being – in his ridiculous, dirty bundle of trees, in his uncalculated life – is happier than us?”

“The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.”

“Revolutions are infinite.”

“Se me acercó, casi se pegó a mí y nuestros hombros se tocaron; estábamos solos. Un extraño fluido pasaba desde ella a mi cuerpo y yo sabía inconscientemente que la cosa había de ser de esta manera. Lo sabía por cada una de mis fibras, por cada latido dulcemente doloroso de mi corazón. Me abandoné con un indecible placer a este sentimiento. Así, con la misma satisfacción, debe someterse un trozo de hierro a la ley inalterable, eterna e inmutable de ser atraído por un imán. Así es como una piedra lanzada al espacio ha de detenerse una fracción de segundo en el aire para caer luego en forma vertical. Y así es como el ser humano ha de respirar hondamente, una sola vez, después de la agonía, antes de expirar definitivamente.”

“–¿Por qué? ¿Y por qué no tenemos plumaje ni alas, sino solamente omoplatos, las bases para las alas? Porque ya no necesitamos alas: porque tenemos aviones y las alas solamente nos estorbarían.”

“¿Qué significaba esto? ¡Qué forma tan extraña de proceder conmigo, como si yo fuese el más insignificante de los seres! «Tal vez todos los de la Casa Antigua no sean más que de mi imaginación mientras escribo – estuve pensando -, pues yo soy el que les ha dado la vida al permitirles anidar en esta faceta donde antes solamente había unos desiertos blancos y rectangulares de papel. Si no estuviera yo, todos aquellos que andan a través de los cauces estrechos de mis líneas, jamás serían conocidos por nadie».Desde luego, nada de todo esto le dije a la vieja, pues sé por experiencia que para un ser humano es la mayor de las afrentas el poner en duda su propia realidad, el dudar de su realidad tridimensional.”