We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Author:Yevgeny Zamyatin [Zamyatin, Yevgeny]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 0140185852
Amazon: B002CIY8QA
Publisher: Penguin Classic
Published: 1970-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

RECORD 20

Discharge Idea Material Zero Cliff

Discharge is the most suitable definition. That’s what that was, I now see: like an electrical discharge. These last few days my pulse has been getting drier and drier, quicker and quicker, more and more tense—the poles closer and closer, making this dry crackling sound. One millimeter more, and there’ll be an explosion. After which: silence.

Inside me right now it’s very quiet and empty, the same as in the building when everyone’s left and you’re lying all alone, sick, and you can hear this clear, precise, metallic beating of your thoughts.

Maybe this “discharge” cured me, finally, of that torment called my “soul,” and I’m just like all the rest of us again. Now at least I don’t feel any pain when I see O in my thoughts standing on the steps of the Cube, when I see her under the Gas Bell. And if she gives them my name there in Operations—so be it. My last act will be to put a pious and grateful kiss on the Benefactor’s punishing hand. In my relationship with OneState I have that right, to undergo punishment, and this right I will not give up. None of us Numbers ought, none dares, to refuse that one right that we have, which means it is the most valuable.

... There’s a quiet, clear metallic sound to my thoughts’ clicking; an unknown aero is carrying me away into the blue heights of my favorite abstractions. And here in this purest, most rarefied air, I see my reflection “on operative right” pop with a slight bang like a tire blowing out. And I see clearly that it was nothing more than a throwback to the ancients’ idiotic superstition, their idea about one’s “right.”

There are ideas made of clay, and there are ideas sculpted for the ages out of gold or out of our precious glass. And to determine what material an idea is made of, all you have to do is let a drop of powerful acid fall on it. Even the ancients knew one such acid: reductio ad finem. That’s what they seem to have called it. But they were afraid of this poison. They preferred to see at least some kind of heaven—however clay, however toylike—to this blue nothing. But we are grown-ups, thanks be to the Benefactor, and don’t need toys.

Look here—suppose you let a drop fall on the idea of “rights. ” Even among the ancients the more grown-up knew that the source of right is power, that right is a function of power. So, take some scales and put on one side a gram, on the other a ton; on one side “I” and on the other “We,” OneState. It’s clear, isn’t it?—to assert that “I” has certain “rights” with respect to the State is exactly the same as asserting that a gram weighs the same as a ton. That explains the way things are divided up: To the ton go the rights, to the gram the duties.

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