Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/109

they are behind the door of the closet. If boots are not a why sickness, should the “soul” be one? I sought, but I could not find, a way out of the logical confusion. It looked to me like that strange and sad debris beyond the Green Wall; my debris of logic, too, is filled with extraordinary, incomprehensible, wordless, but speaking beings. It occurred to me for a moment that through some strange thick glass I saw it; I saw it at once infinitely large and infinitely small, scorpion-like, with hidden but ever perceptible sting; I saw the square root of minus one. Perhaps it was nothing else but my “soul,” which, like the legendary scorpion of the ancients, was voluntarily stinging itself with. . .

The Bell! The day began. All I saw and felt neither died nor disappeared; it merely became covered with daylight, as our visible world does not die or disappear at the end of the day but merely becomes covered with the darkness of night. My head was filled with a light, a thin haze. Through that haze I perceived the long glass tables and the globe-like heads busy chewing—slowly, silently, in unison. At a distance, through the haze, the metronome was slowly beating its tick-tock, and to the accompaniment of this customary and caressing music I joined with the others in counting automatically to fifty: fifty is the number of chewing movements required by the law of the State for every piece of food. And automatically then, keeping time, I went downstairs and put my name down in the book for the outgoing Numbers, as everyone did. But I felt I lived separately from everybody; I lived by myself separated by a soft wall which absorbed noises; beyond that wall there was my own world.

Here a thought occurred to me. If that world is only my own, why should I tell about it in these records? Why should I recount all these absurd “dreams” about closets, endless corridors? With great sorrow I notice that instead of a correct and strictly mathematical poem in honor of the United State I am writing a fantastic novel. Oh! if only