Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/108

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We

blindly, avidly I clung to her. I remember clearly even now: through the narrow crack of the door a sharp sun ray like lightning broke into the darkness and played on the floor and walls of the closet, and a little higher the cruel ray blade fell upon the naked neck of I-330, and this for some reason seemed to me so terrible that I could not bear it, and I screamed—and again I opened my eyes. My room!

The morning was still green and motionless. On the door of my closet was a fragment of the sunshine. I was in bed. A dream? Yet my heart was still wildly beating, quivering and twitching; there was a dull pain in the tips my fingers and in my knees. This undoubtedly did happen! And now I am no longer able to distinguish what of is dream from what is actuality; irrational numbers grow through my solid, habitual, tridimensional life; and instead of firm, polished surfaces, there is something shaggy and rough. . . .

I waited long for the Bell to ring. I was lying thinking, untangling a very strange logical chain. In our superficial life, every formula, every equation, corresponds to a curve or a solid. We have never seen any curve or solid corresponding to mv square root of minus one. The horrifying part of the situation is that there exist such curves or solids. Unseen by us they do exist, they must, inevitably; for in mathematics, as on a screen, strange, sharp shadows appear before us. One must remember that mathematics, like death, never makes mistakes, never plays tricks. If we are unable to see those irrational curves or solids, it means only that they inevitably possess a whole immense world somewhere beneath the surface of our life. . . .

I jumped up without waiting for the waking Bell and began to pace up and down the room. My mathematics, the only firm and immovable island of my shaken life, this, too, was torn from its anchor and was floating, whirling. Then it means that that absurd thing, the “soul,” is as real as my unif, as my boots, although I do not see them since

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