We – Yevgeny Zamyatain

Freedom and Criminality

“Liberation?” Astonishing how the criminal instincts do survive in the human species. I choose the word criminal advisedly. Freedom and criminality are just as indissolubly linked as . . . well, as the movement of an aero and its velocity. When the velocity of an aero is reduced to 0, it is not in motion; when a man’s freedom is reduced to zero, he commits no crimes. That’s clear. The only means to rid man of crime is to rid of it …

Paradise

“Paradise,” he began, and the p meant spray. “The old legend about Paradise-that was about us, about right now. Yes! Just think about it. Those two Paradise, they were offered a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness, nothing else. Those idiots chose freedom. And then what? Then for centuries they were homesick for the chains. That’s why the world was so miserable, see? They missed the chains. For ages! And we were the first to hit on the way to get back to happiness. No, wait . . . listen to me. The ancient God and us, side by side, at the same table. Yes! We helped God finally overcome the Devil-because that’s who it was that pushed people to break the commandment and taste freedom and be ruined. It was him, the wily serpent. But we give him a boot to the head! Crack! And it was all over: Paradise was back. And we’re simple and innocent again, like Adam and Eve. None of those complications about good and evil: Everything is very simple, childishly simple-Paradise! The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell, the Guardians: All those things represent good, all that is sublime, splendid, noble, elevated, crystal pure. Because that is what protects our nonfreedom, which is to say, our happiness. Here’s where the ancients would stand around discussing things, weighing this and that, racking their brains: is this etichal, unetichal? . . . Well, you get the point. What I’m saying is, there’s this great poem of Paradise, right?

Limit of Function

Well, of course, it’s clear that you can’t establish a function without taking into account what its limit is. And it’s also clear that what I felt yesterday, the stupid “dissolving in the universe” if you take it to its limit, is death. Because that’s exactly what death is-the fullest possible dissolving of myself into the universe. Hence, if we let L stand for love and D for death, then L = f (D), i.e. love and death. . . .
Yes, that’s it, that’s it. That’s why I’m afraid of I-330, why I fight against her, why I don’t want . . . But why do those two exist side by side in me: I don’t want and I want? That’s just what’s so horrible: What I want is that blissful death of yesterday. What’s so horrible is that even now, when the logical function has been integrated, when it’s obvious that is contains, as a hidden component, death itself, I still want her, my lips, my arms, my chest, every millimetre of me wants her . . .


Who you really are

“Who knows who you really are? A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don’t know how it’s going to end. Otherwise, there’d be no point in reading. . . .”


Entropy and Energy

. . . Or, no, I’d better put it in your language so you’ll understand it sooner. Look – there are two forces in the world, entropy and energy. One of them leads to blissful disruption of equilibrium, to the torment of perpetual movement. Our – or rather, yours – ancestors, the Christians, worshipped entropy as they worshipped God, But we anti-Christians, we . . . “