Yevgeny Zamyatin was born in central Russia on 1 February 1884. He studied in St Petersburg and was arrested and exiled to Finland in 1905 as a Bolshevik student activist. After his return to St Petersburg he completed an engineering degree before being sent to Newcastle upon Tyne in 1916 to supervise the construction of Russian icebreaker ships. He returned to Russia during the 1917 revolution. His most famous work, the dystopian novel We, was denied publication by the Soviet authorities but was published abroad in the late 1920s, leading to Zamyatin’s disgrace and the removal of his works from Soviet libraries. Zamyatin applied to Stalin for permission to emigrate in 1931 and lived in Paris until his death on 10 March 1937. We was finally published in the Soviet Union in 1989.
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Translation and Translator’s Note copyright © Natasha S. Randall 2006
Introduction copyright © Will Self 2007
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We was written in 1920. This translation is based on the edition published in 1952 by Chekhov House Publishers.
First published in the United States by The Modern Library in 2006
First published in Great Britain by Vintage in 2007
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ISBN 9780099511434
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Translator’s Note
WE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
I read We for the first time in order to write this foreword. I suppose that’s a confession I shouldn’t make; there’s a David Lodge novel in which English literature academics play a parlour game that consists of admitting, shamelessly, to the great texts they haven’t read. One of them ‘fesses up to Hamlet, wins, and is sacked the following day.
However, I have no position that can be threatened by such an admission. I undertook to write about this novel purely in order to get myself to read it. A nice expedient – if you can get it. I’m very glad I did. I may be a little too old for literary revelations, for those seminal reading experiences that, like first loves, are incised on the brain and the heart; yet were it possible – perhaps employing a kind of pychosurgery, as anticipated by Zamyatin – to retrospectively implant in my growing mind the memory of this book, it’s an operation I would willingly undergo.
I read We while staying on the Hebridean island of Jura, where George Orwell – perhaps the book’s greatest disciple – wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. On the night I finished Zamyatin’s novel, I went to have dinner with the family who still own the remote farm of Barnhill, where Orwell lived. Walking back over the boggy moors, the four miles to the public road where I’d left my car, I mused on dystopias and those who feel compelled to write them.
A couple of days earlier, I’d come over on the ferry from Islay, and fallen into conversation with a Lycra-clad cyclist. He retailed Jura’s Orwell connection to me, and I said, ‘I know.’
‘Remarkably prescient book, that,’ he said of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
‘Oh,’ I queried, ‘in what way?’
‘Well,’ the cyclist flustered a little, ‘surveillance, for one thing – he anticipated all of that.’
‘In a way,’ I slapped him down, ‘but it was hardly the kind of surveillance we’ve actually ended up with, now is it?’
No, the surveillance that Orwell was obsessed by – an obsession he shared with Zamyatin – was the kind that looks into the souls of men and women, the kind that is designed to establish what they believe. The glass apartment blocks of the One State, as envisaged in We, are only concomitantly designed to reveal physical acts – and so it is with Orwell’s television screens and microphones – what they mostly serve to expose is heretical thought.
From the contemporary English perspective, it hardly matters if a remote CCTV camera operator (our version of Zamyatin’s Guardians) tells you – via a proximate PA system – that you should pick up your litter, as long as interest-free credit is available so you can buy the consumer durable from which you’ve just torn the packaging. Now every heretical idea can be thought – but no such idea can gain any purchase; it simply blows about the shopping precinct.
No. Orwell’s dystopic novel was a warning, forcibly recounting what had happened in the Soviet Union and urging people in the West to resist such totalitarian encroachment in the wake of the three-power conference at Yalta, which carved up the post-war world. By contrast, We was written in the white heat of the Bolshevik crucible, as the icy tyranny was perfusing into the people’s very synapses, making doublethink an aspect of everyday life. It is this that gives the novel its furious bite, its citric acerbity.
It is not a new observation to say of futurity that it is mostly about Now, just as most narrative history says more concerning the current political opinions of those that write it. What, I think, is perhaps less understood, is the extent to which the urge to portray alternative societies is also a desire to call attention to the falsity of all human collectivisation. Seen this way, any notions of the republic, the state, the nation, the kingdom, the fatherland, have equal dubiety. Zamyatin understood this better than Orwell. He contrasted the regimented ciphers of the One State, in their identical and formless unifs, with furry, farouche humans, in a state of revivified nature beyond the wall. For Winston Smith hope lies with the ‘proles’, for Zamyatin it is beyond them.
Schopenhauer wrote that there was a particular appositeness in the designation ‘person’ to refer to the human individual, as the Latin ‘persona’ means mask and, in life, we all wear a mask and act a part. And societies, too, wear masks, while whether they manifest themselves as dystopias, utopias, or somewhere in between, is less significant than the fact that to play a role in society is always to strut upon a stage.
No one would want to strut across Thomas More’s island Utopia with its religious toleration and pacific people, any more than they would choose to set foot on Aldous Huxley’s Island, where sexual licence and mysticism ooze in and out of one another. In both idealised societies, there are forms of regimentation that are ineluctably bound up with their imagined construction. Either one would be quite as stiflingly restrictive as promenading in ranks of four beneath the minatory gaze of the Benefactor. No writer who imagines a world – rather than merely describing it – can avoid this property of its virtuality.
It is this more than anything else that makes the writing of dystopias appeal to me; let the so-called ‘naturalistic writers’ make the pretence of depicting the world as we all see it – they are only confounded by their own partiality, as it’s revealed in every line. But we fictional imagineers (to adapt Walt Disney’s term for his theme park designers – a coinage I think Zamyatin might approve) are pure in our intent: we write of men and women in their social aspect, and therefore cannot be deceived by born deceivers.
Zamyatin’s own inventions – the Integral, the Accumulator Tower, the Bell Jar, the aero – are far more prescient than those of the science fiction writers who stowed away in the new genre, once the former shipbuilder had launched it. There is a curious contrast in We between the adamantine surfaces of the shiny technology Zamyatin describes, and the ambiguity of its actual mechanism. I think this is carefully thought through, just as science fiction is invariably about Now, so nothing dates more rapidly than futurity. It’s worth contrasting the enduring contemporaneousness of Zamyatin with the otiose feel of writers – such as Jules Verne – who relied on too much technical exposition. We is Tarkovsky’s Solaris, to Kubrick’s 2001.
Yet it is in its apprehension of inchoate social forms that We achieves genius. The notion of petroleum-based food abolishing famine cannot help but seem like a satiric inversion of the oil dependency of the industrial world: which was growing in the 1920s, and has now reached terminal addiction.
The aforementioned glasshouses, and the whole panoply of legitimated promiscuity – its multiple partners and pink tickets – with which Zamyatin counterpoints his tale of amour fou, likewise come again to condemn us for our mindless sexual banality, which, from a Martian perspective, can appear as the humping of the multitude. Although, there’s more to We and sex than this – it’s no mere moralising tract.
But it’s with the grisly Operation itself, the accelerator and climacteric of a novel that already rushes at breakneck speed, that we see Zamyatin at his most chillingly beguiling. He has already primed us by having his protagonist, the schizophrenically conflicted D-503, write of the immorality of ancient societies, in which it was illegitimate to murder one, while the many could annihilate themselves with tobacco and alcohol. Now he introduces lobotomy as an instrument of social control – or is it, perhaps, the severing of the corpus callosum, the information superhighway of the human brain?
In the current idiom: whatever; Zamyatin saw clearly that implicit in the Bolshevik time and motion tyranny, its glorification of the Stakhanovite, were the same tendencies at work now in our own therapeutic states, where statistical decisions become moral ones, and the Bell Curve is quite as deadly an oppression as his own Bell Jar.
But what struck me most about We, weren’t these outliers of the Age to Come, but quite how distinctively Russian a novel it is. Just as Zamyatin’s structure – plot is perhaps too formulaic a term – has affinities with Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, with its multiple and displaced journal entries, so D-503 is a superfluous man – and also an underground one. Indeed, it’s Dostoevsky that came most frequently to my mind while reading We, and specifically the stuffy, cold rooms, within which his anti-hero acts out, with his tortured, self-exculpatory, self-annihilating rants, the world-destroying conflict between the absolutism of Christianity and the messy – yet totalising – moral relativism he saw, already implicit, in the revolutionaries of 1848, among whom he had been numbered.
Like Dostoevsky, Zamyatin was a revolutionary recusant, but he does not retreat into mysticism. With its plosive language, its prose of stuttering enjambment, its pell-mell transitions of space, time and psychic state, its agonies of ellipsis and its daring synaesthesia, We may be out of this world – yet it remains profoundly of it. Its author may have rejected the symbolism he saw around him in name, yet the same inky blood flows in his veins as those of Blok, or Rimbaud for that matter.
To read We is to be, once again, in a time when style mattered, not as an affectation, or worse, mannerism, but as a means of making beautiful words-as-thought; creating meaning. Zamyatin’s mathematical tropes, the basic arithmetic through which the One State configures itself, may be of interest to those who think in mathematics – I don’t. Instead, the resolution of faces into Euclidean shapes is less important to me than the capacity Zamyatin’s prose exhibits of forcing us to look at the world anew, in every particular. It is hallucinogenic in this, most important, respect.
Lastly, as others have noted, We is first and foremost a love story – an extreme, passionate, world-destroying, emphatically deranged love story. This is not Freud’s ‘everyman’s psychosis’, but the psychosis of one man alone. Between D-503 and I-330 there passes the electromagnetic current of repulsion and attraction, whirling into erotic power. It is this adrenalised state that permeates the text – like musk – quite as much as the terror of the One State, or the perverse synchrony of its ciphers. To read We is to forever, like D-503, be in thrall to the ‘whole pinkness’ of I-330, to taste, forever, her ‘unbearably sweet lips’.
I, as I have conceded, had to compel myself to read We – you have picked it up of your own volition. There’s nothing wrong with compelling yourself to read books, as long as they’re as good as this one, but how much more satisfying to have discovered Zamyatin’s nightmarish vision of collectivism and control by your own free will.
Will Self, London, 2007
The language of We is as tight and suggestive as a coiled spring. Every sound, every letter, every syllable, every cluster of words has its design. In pursuing this translation I was intensely aware of this novel’s acoustics.
Indeed, Zamyatin once told artist Yuri Annenkov about the qualities he ascribes to each letter. For him, L is pale, cold, light blue, liquid, light. R is loud, bright, red, hot, fast. N is tender, snow, sky, night. D and T are stifling, grave, foggy, obscuring, stagnant. M is kind, soft, motherly, sea-like. A is wide, distant, ocean, misty mirage, breadth of scope. O is high, deep, sea-like, bosom. I is close, low, pressing. And over the course of this translation, I heard this personal alphabet very clearly. So I kept as close to him as I could. I distinctly recall the moment of deciding to render sverkayushchii (a very important word in the novel) as ‘sparkling’ rather than ‘glittering.’
I was equally responsive to the rhythm of his prose. His words syncopate – they rush and they brake – and I hope to have preserved Zamyatin’s rhythmics with this new translation. He is particularly fond of the dash, the colon and the ellipsis. I strived to preserve his tempi through a translation of punctuations between idioms. There are unexpected shifts in tense. He omits verbs and other grammatical elements. He avoids the words ‘like’ and ‘such as’, preferring direct metaphor. I kept his sentence fragments. There are neologisms like ‘javelinishly’, which describes the way a doctor laughs at D-503. Zamyatin insists on the leitmotif as a device to achieve artistic economy, so these signifiers are necessarily translated consistently throughout the book. Overall, Zamyatin approaches the design of his meticulous text with extreme logic. His character D-503, the voice of his novel, speaks in equations. In my rendering here, D-503’s sentences pivot cause and consequence around colons, like they would around an equal sign (=).
The syntactical pacing and pulsing in both the Russian and this translation may seem strange at first, until you surrender to Zamyatin’s ‘language of thought.’ Zamyatin explains it himself in an essay called ‘On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters’:
Old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity – but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage. We must compress into a single second what was held before in a sixty-second minute. And hence, syntax becomes elliptic, volatile; the complex pyramids of full-stops are dismantled stone by stone into independent sentences. When you are moving fast, the canonised, the customary eludes the eye: hence, the unusual, often startling, symbolism and vocabulary. The image is sharp, synthetic, with a single salient feature – the one feature that you would glimpse from a speeding car.
Godspeed,
Natasha Randall, 2007
I am merely copying, word for word, what was printed in the State Gazette today:
IN 120 DAYS, THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE INTEGRAL WILL BE COMPLETE. THE GREAT, HISTORIC HOUR WHEN THE FIRST INTEGRAL WILL SOAR THROUGH OUTER SPACE IS NIGH. SOME THOUSAND YEARS AGO, YOUR HEROIC ANCESTORS SUBJUGATED THE ENTIRE EARTHLY SPHERE TO THE POWER OF THE ONE STATE. TODAY, YOU ARE CONFRONTING AN EVEN GREATER CONQUEST: THE INTEGRATION OF THE INFINITE EQUATION OF THE UNIVERSE WITH THE ELECTRIFIED AND FIRE-BREATHING GLASS INTEGRAL. YOU ARE CONFRONTING UNKNOWN CREATURES ON ALIEN PLANETS, WHO MAY STILL BE LIVING IN THE SAVAGE STATE OF FREEDOM, AND SUBJUGATING THEM TO THE BENEFICIAL YOKE OF REASON. IF THEY WON’T UNDERSTAND THAT WE BRING THEM MATHEMATICALLY INFALLIBLE HAPPINESS, IT WILL BE OUR DUTY TO FORCE THEM TO BE HAPPY. BUT BEFORE RESORTING TO ARMS, WE WILL EMPLOY THE WORD.
IN THE NAME OF THE BENEFACTOR, LET IT BE KNOWN TO ALL CIPHERS OF THE ONE STATE:
ALL THOSE WHO ARE ABLE ARE REQUIRED TO CREATE TREATISES, EPICS, MANIFESTOS, ODES, OR ANY OTHER COMPOSITION ADDRESSING THE BEAUTY AND MAJESTY OF THE ONE STATE.
THESE WORKS WILL BE THE FIRST CARGO OF THE INTEGRAL.
ALL HAIL THE ONE STATE, ALL HAIL CIPHERS, ALL HAIL THE BENEFACTOR!
As I write this, I feel something: my cheeks are burning. Integrating the grand equation of the universe: yes. Taming a wild zigzag along a tangent, toward the asymptote, into a straight line: yes. You see, the line of the One State—it is a straight line. A great, divine, precise, wise, straight line—the wisest of lines.
I am D-503. I am the Builder of the Integral. I am only one of the mathematicians of the One State. My pen, more accustomed to mathematical figures, is not up to the task of creating the music of unison and rhyme. I will just attempt to record what I see, what I think—or, more exactly, what we think. (Yes, that’s right: we. And let that also be the title of these records: We.) So these records will be manufactured from the stuff of our life, from the mathematically perfect life of the One State, and, as such, might they become, inadvertently, regardless of my intentions, an epic poem? Yes—I believe so and I know so.
As I write this: I feel my cheeks burn. I suppose this resembles what a woman experiences when she first hears a new pulse within her—the pulse of a tiny, unseeing, mini-being. This text is me; and simultaneously not me. And it will feed for many months on my sap, my blood, and then, in anguish, it will be ripped from my self and placed at the foot of the One State.
But I am ready and willing, just as every one—or almost every one of us. I am ready.
Spring. From beyond the Green Wall, from the wild, invisible plains, the wind brings the yellow honey-dust from a flower of some kind. This sweet dust parches the lips—you skim your tongue across them every minute—and you presume that there are sweet lips on every woman you encounter (and man, of course). This somewhat interferes with logical reasoning.
But then, the sky! Blue, untainted by a single cloud (the Ancients had such barbarous tastes given that their poets could have been inspired by such stupid, sloppy, silly-lingering clumps of vapour). I love—and I’m certain that I’m not mistaken if I say we love—skies like this, sterile and flawless! On days like these, the whole world is blown from the same shatterproof, everlasting glass as the glass of the Green Wall and of all our structures. On days like these, you can see to the very blue depths of things, to their unknown surfaces, those marvelous expressions of mathematical equality—which exist in even the most usual and everyday objects.
For instance, this morning I was at the hangar, where the Integral is being built, and suddenly: I noticed the machines. Eyes shut, oblivious, the spheres of the regulators were spinning; the cranks were twinkling, dipping to the right and to the left; the shoulders of the balance wheel were rocking proudly; and the cutting head of the perforating machine curtsied, keeping time with some inaudible music. Instantly I saw the greater beauty of this grand mechanised ballet, suffused with nimble pale-blue sunbeams.
And then I thought to myself: why? Is this beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? The answer: because it is non-free movement, because the whole profound point of this dance lies precisely in its absolute, aesthetic subordination, its perfect non-freedom. If indeed our ancestors were prone to dancing at the most inspired moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), then all this can only mean one thing: the instinct for non-freedom, from the earliest of times, is inherently characteristic of humankind, and we, in our very contemporary life, are simply more conscious …
To be continued: the intercom is clicking. I lift my eyes: it reads “O-90,” of course. And, in half a minute, she herself will be here to collect me: we are scheduled for a walk.
Sweet O! It has always seemed to me that she looks like her name: she is about ten centimeters below the Maternal Norm, which makes her lines all rounded, and a pink O—her mouth—is open to receive my every word. Also: there are round, chubby creases around her wrists—such as you see on the wrists of children.
When she entered, I was still buzzing inside out with the flywheel of logic and, through inertia, I started to utter some words about this formula I had only just resolved (which justified all of us, the machines and the dance): “Stunning, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes, the spring, it is stunning …” O-90 smiled pinkly.
Wouldn’t you know it: spring … I say “stunning” and she thinks of spring. Women … I fell silent.
Downstairs. The avenue is crowded: we normally use the Personal Hour after lunch for extra walking when the weather is like this. As usual, the Music Factory was singing the March of the One State with all its pipes. All ciphers walked in measured rows, by fours, rapturously keeping step. Hundreds and thousands of ciphers, in pale bluish unifs,1 with gold badges on their chests, indicating the state-given digits of each male and female. And I—we, our foursome—was one of the countless waves of this mighty torrent. On my left was O-90 (a thousand years ago, our hairy forebears most probably would have written that funny word “my” when referring to her just now); on my right were two rather unfamiliar ciphers, a female and a male.
The blessed-blue sky, the tiny baby suns in each badge, faces unclouded by the folly of thought … All these were rays, you see—all made of some sort of unified, radiant, smiling matter. And a brass beat: Tra-ta-ta-tam, Tra-ta-ta-tam—like sun-sparkling brass stairs—and with each step up, you climb higher and higher into the head-spinning blueness …
And here, like this morning in the hangar, I saw it all as though for the very first time: the immutably straight streets, the ray-spraying glass of the pavements, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent buildings, and the quadratic harmony of the grey-blue ranks. And then: it was as if I—not whole generations past—had personally, myself, conquered the old God and the old life. As if I personally had created all this. And I was like a tower, not daring to move even an elbow, for fear of scattering walls, cupolas, machines …
And then, in an instant: a hop across centuries from + to –. I was reminded—obviously, it was association by contrast—I was suddenly reminded of a picture in the museum depicting their olden day, twentieth-century avenue in deafening multicolour: a jumbled crush of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, paint, birds … And do you know, they say that it was actually like that—that it’s actually possible. I found that so improbable, so ludicrous, that I couldn’t contain myself and laughed out loud.
And then there was an echo—a laugh—coming from the right. I spun around: the white—unusually white—and sharp teeth of an unfamiliar female face were before my eyes.
“Forgive me,” she said, “but you were observing your surroundings with such an inspired look—like some mythical god on the seventh day of creation. It looked as though you actually believed that you, yourself, had created everything—even me! I’m very flattered …”
All this was said without smiling, and I’d even go as far as to say that there was a certain reverence (maybe she was aware that I am the Builder of the Integral). And I don’t know—perhaps it was somewhere in her eyes or eyebrows—there was a kind of strange and irritating X to her, and I couldn’t pin it down, couldn’t give it any numerical expression.
For some reason, I became embarrassed and, fumbling, began to justify my laughter to her with logic. It was perfectly clear, I was saying, that the contrast, the impassable chasm, that lies between today and yesterday …
“But why on earth impassable?” What white teeth! “Across the chasm—throw up a bridge! Just imagine it for yourself: the drums, the battalions, the ranks—these were all things that existed back then too. And consequently …”
“Well, yes, it’s clear!” I cried (it was an astonishing intersection of thoughts: she was using almost exactly my words—the ones I had been writing just before this walk). “You see, even in our thoughts. No one is ever ‘one,’ but always ‘one of.’ We are so identical …”
Her words: “Are you sure?”
I saw those jerked-up eyebrows forming sharp angles toward her temples—like the sharp horns of an X—and again, somehow, got confused. I glanced right, then left and …
She was on my right: thin, sharp, stubbornly supple, like a whip (I can now see her digits are I-330). On my left was O-90, totally different, made of circumferences, with that childlike little crease on her arm; and at the far right of our foursome was an unfamiliar male cipher, sort of twice-bent, a bit like the letter “S.” We were all different …
This I-330 woman, on my right, had apparently intercepted my confused glance and with an exhale: “Yes … Alas!”
In essence, her “alas” was absolutely fitting. But again, there was something about her face, or her voice …
I—with uncharacteristic abruptness—said: “Nothing alas about it. Science progresses, and it’s clear that given another fifty, a hundred years …”
“Even everyone’s noses will be …”
“Yes, noses,” I was now almost screaming. “If, after all, there is any good reason for enviousness … like the fact that I might have a nose like a button and some other cipher might have …”
“Well, actually, your nose, if you don’t mind me saying, is quite ‘classical,’ as they would say in the olden days. And look, your hands … show, come on, show me your hands!”
I cannot stand it when people look at my hands, all hairy and shaggy—such stupid atavistic appendages. I extended my arms and with as steady a voice as I could, I said: “Monkey hands.”
She looked at my hands and then at my face: “Yes, they strike a very curious chord.” She sized me up with eyes like a set of scales, the horns at the corners of her eyebrows glinting again.
“He is registered to me today,” O-90 rosily-joyfully opened her mouth.
It would have been better to have stayed quiet—this was absolutely irrelevant. Altogether, this sweet O person … how can I express this … She has an incorrectly calculated speed of tongue. The microspeed of the tongue ought to be always slightly less than the microspeed of the thoughts and certainly not ever the reverse.
At the end of the avenue, the bell at the top of the Accumulator Tower resoundingly struck 17:00. The Personal Hour was over. I-330 was stepping away with that S-like male cipher. He commanded a certain respect and, now I see, he had a possibly familiar face. I must have met him somewhere—but right now I can’t think where.
As I-330 departed, I-330 smiled with that same X-ishness. “Come by Auditorium 112 the day after tomorrow.”
I shrugged my shoulders: “If I am given instructions to go to the particular auditorium you mention, then …”
With inexplicable conviction, she said: “You will.”
The effect of that woman on me was as unpleasant as a displaced irrational number that has accidentally crept into an equation. And I was glad that, even if only for a short while, I was alone again with sweet O.
Arm in arm, we walked across four avenue blocks. On the corner, she would go to the right and I to the left.
“I would so like to come to you today and lower the blinds. Today, right now …” O shyly lifted her blue-crystal eyes to me.
You funny thing. Well, what could I say to her? She came over only yesterday and knows as well as I do that our next Sex Day is the day after tomorrow. This was simply that same “pre-ignition of thought” as happens (sometimes harmfully) when a spark is issued prematurely in an engine.
Before parting, I twice … no, I’ll be exact: I kissed her marvelous, blue, untainted-by-a-single-cloud eyes three times.
1It is unlikely this comes from the ancient word Uniforme.
I looked through all that I wrote yesterday and I see: I was not writing clearly enough. I mean, all this is of course completely clear to any one of us. But how do I know: it may be that you, unknown reader, to whom the Integral will be carrying these records, have only read the great Book of Civilization up to the page that describes the life of our ancestors nine hundred years ago? It may be that you don’t know terms like the Table of Hours, the Personal Hour, the Maternal Norm, the Green Wall, the Benefactor. It is amusing to me—and at the same time very laborious to explain all this. It is exactly as if a writer of, let’s say, the twentieth century, were made to explain in his novel the meaning of the words “jacket,” “apartment,” or “wife.” But then again, if his novel is to be translated for barbarians, would it make any sense to carry on without notes about the likes of “jackets”?
I am certain that the barbarian, looking at a “jacket” would think: “What’s this for? Just more to carry on my back.” I have a feeling that you will think exactly the same thing when I tell you that none of us, since the Two-Hundred-Year War, has been beyond the Green Wall.
But, my dear friends, you must try to think a little now—it will help matters. It is clear that the whole of human history, as far as we know, is the story of transition from a nomadic mode of life toward an increasingly settled one. Surely it follows then that the most settled mode of life (ours) is also the most perfected life (ours)? It was in previous eras that people rushed about the Earth from end to end, when there were nations, wars, trade, the discoveries of different Americas. But why—and for whom—is this necessary anymore?
I will allow: becoming accustomed to this kind of settledness was not effortless or immediate. During the Two-Hundred-Year War, all roads were destroyed and grasses grew over everything and, initially, it must have been very uncomfortable to live in cities, which were cut off from one another by green thickets. But what of it? I imagine that after man’s tail fell off, he, likewise, didn’t immediately know how to fend off flies without the help of his tail. He, at the beginning, undoubtedly mourned his tail. But can you imagine yourself now with a tail? Or can you imagine yourself on the street, naked, without a “jacket”(perhaps you still walk around wearing “jackets”)? Well, that is how it is here: I cannot picture a city without the dressing of the Green Wall, I cannot picture a life not expressed in the numerical overlay of the Table.
The Table … Right now, from the wall of my room, from the panel of gold underlay, the burgundy numbers are looking me in the eye, sternly but tenderly. I am involuntarily reminded of that which the Ancients called “icons,” and I feel like making up poems or prayers (the same thing). Ah, if only I were a poet, I would rightly exalt you, O Table, O heart and pulse of the One State.
All of us (perhaps you, too), as children, read at school that greatest of all ancient literary legacies: The Railroad Schedule. But even if you put that next to the Table, you will see it is graphite next to diamond: in each is the same C, carbon, but how eternal, how transparent, how dazzling is the diamond. Who is not made breathless when racing and rumbling through the pages of the Schedule? But the Table of Hours—it transforms each of us into the real-life, six-wheeled, steel heroes of a great epic. Each morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the exact same hour, at the exact same minute, we, the millions, rise as one. At the exact same hour, we uni-millionly start work and uni-millionly stop work. And, merged into a single, million-handed body, at the exact same Table-appointed second, we bring spoons to our lips, we go out for our walk and go to the auditorium, to the Taylor Exercise Hall, go off to sleep …
I will be totally frank: the absolutely exact solution to the mystery of happiness has not yet fully materialised even here. Twice a day—from 16:00 to 17:00 and from 21:00 to 22:00—the united powerful organism scatters to its separate cages. These are written into the Table of Hours: the Personal Hours. In these hours you will see chastely lowered blinds in the rooms of some; others are walking along avenues, deliberately, to the brass beat of the March; and others still, like me now, are at their desks. But I firmly believe—call me an idealist or fantasist—I believe that sooner or later, one day, we’ll find a place in the general formula for these hours too, one day all of these 86,400 seconds will be accounted for in the Table of Hours.
I’ve come to read and hear many unlikely things about the times when people lived in freedom, i.e., the unorganised savage state. But the most unlikely thing, it seems to me, is this: how could the olden day governmental power—primitive though it was—have allowed people to live without anything like our Table, without the scheduled walks, without the precise regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever it occurred to them? Various historians even say that, apparently, in those times, lights burned in the streets all night long, and all night long, people rode and walked the streets.
This I just cannot comprehend in any way. Their faculties of reason may not have been developed, but they must have understood more broadly that living like that amounted to mass murder—literally—only it was committed slowly, day after day. The State (humaneness) forbade killing to death any one person but didn’t forbid the half-killing of millions. To kill a man, that is, to decrease the sum of a human life span by fifty years—this was criminal. But decreasing the sum of many humans’ lives by fifty million years—this was not criminal. Isn’t that funny? This mathematical-moral mystery could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old cipher here among us; but they couldn’t do it—not with all their Kants put together (because not one of their Kants ever figured out how to build a system of scientific ethics based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication).