Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/133

secret reason for sparing me for a while, but he wrote a short note, handed it to one of those who had held me, and again I was free. That is, I was again included in the orderly, endless Assyrian rows of Numbers.

The quadrangle, the freckled face, and the temple with the map of blue veinlets disappeared forever around the corner. We walked again—a million-headed body; and in each one of us resided that humble joyfulness with which in all probability molecules, atoms, and phagocytes live.

In the ancient days the Christians understood this feeling; they are our only, though very imperfect, direct forerunners. The greatness of the “Church of the United Flock” was known to them. They knew that resignation is virtue, and pride a vice; that “We” is from “God,” “I,” from the devil.

I was walking, keeping step with the others yet separated from them. I was still trembling from the emotion just felt, like a bridge over which a thundering ancient steel train has passed a moment before. I felt myself. To feel one’s self, to be conscious of one’s personality, is the lot of an eye inflamed by a cinder, or an infected finger, or a bad tooth. A healthy eye, or finger, or tooth is not felt; it is nonexistent, as it were. Is it not clear, then, that consciousness of oneself is a sickness?

Apparently I am no longer a phagocyte which quietly, in a businesslike way, devours microbes (microbes with freckled faces and blue temples); apparently I am myself a microbe, and she, too, I-330, is a microbe, a wonderful, diabolic microbe! It is quite possible that there are already thousands of such microbes among us, still pretending to be phagocytes, as I pretend. What if today’s accident, although in itself not important, is only a beginning, only the first meteorite of a shower of burning and thundering stones which the infinite may have poured out upon our glass paradise?