Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/110

it were a novel and not my actual life, full of X’s, square roots of minus one, and downfalls! Yet all may be for the best. Probably you, my unknown readers, are children still as compared with us. We are brought up by the United State; consequently we have reached the highest summits attainable by man. And you, being children, may swallow without crying all the bitter things I am to give you only if they be coated with the syrup of adventures.

Are you familiar with the following sensation? You are in an aero and you dash upward along a blue spiral line; the window is open and the wind rushes past your face, whistling. There is no earth. The earth is forgotten. The earth is as far from you as Venus, Saturn, or Jupiter. That is how I live now. A hurricane wind beats into my face; I forget the earth, forget rosy, dear O-90. Yet the earth does exist, and sooner or later I must plane down to that earth; only I close my eyes to avoid seeing the date at which the name O-90 is written on my Tables.

This evening the distant earth reminded me of itself. In order to fulfill the recommendation of the doctor (I desire sincerely, most sincerely I desire, to be cured), I wandered for two hours and eight minutes over the straight lines of the deserted avenues. Everybody was in the auditoriums, in accordance with the Table. Only I, cut off from the rest, I was alone. Strictly speaking, it was a very unnatural situation. Imagine a finger cut off from the whole, from the hand; a separate human finger, some-what hunched, running over the glass sidewalk. I was such a finger. What seemed most strange and unnatural was that the finger had no desire to be with its hand, with its fellows. I want either to be alone or with her, to transfuse my whole being into hers through a contact with her shoulder or through our interwoven fingers.