Eleventh Entry

Topics: No, I cannot, I’ll simply write, without a plan

Evening. A light mist. The sky is hidden by a milky-golden veil and you cannot see what is above, beyond it. The ancients knew that God – their greatest, bored skeptic – was there. We know that there is only a crystal-blue, naked, indecent nothing. But now I do not know what is there: I have learned too much. Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith. I had had firm faith in myself; I had believed that I knew everything within myself. And now…

I stand before a mirror. And for the first time in my life – yes, for the first time – I see myself clearly, sharply, consciously. I see myself with astonishment as a certain “he.” Here am I – he: black eyebrows, etched in a straight line; and between them, like a scar, a vertical fold (I don’t know whether it was there before). Steel-gray eyes, surrounded by the shadow of a sleepless night. And there, behind this steel… it turns out that I have never known what is there. And out of “there” (this “there” is at the same time here and infinitely far), out of “there” I look at myself – at him – and I know: he, with his straight eyebrows, is a stranger, alien to me, someone I am meeting for the first time in my life. And I, the real I, am not he.

No. Period. All this is nonsense, and all these absurd sensations are but delirium, the result of yesterday’s poisoning… Poisoning by what? – a sip of the green venom, or by her? It does not matter. I am writing all this down merely to show how strangely human reason, so sharp and so precise, can be confused and thrown into disarray. Reason that had succeeded in making even infinity, of which the ancients were so frightened, acceptable to them by means of…

The annunciator clicks: it is R-13. Let him come; in fact, I am glad. It is too difficult for me to be alone now…

Twenty minutes later

On the plane surface of the paper, in the two-dimensional world, these lines are next to one another. But in a different world they… I am losing my sense of figures: twenty minutes may be two hundred or two hundred thousand. And it seems so strange to write down in calm, measured, carefully chosen words what has occurred just now between me and R. It is like sitting down in an armchair by your own bedside, legs crossed, and watching curiously how you yourself are writhing in the bed.

When R-13 entered, I was perfectly calm and normal. I spoke with sincere admiration of how splendidly he had succeeded in versifying the sentence, and told him that his trochees had been the most effective instrument of all in crushing and destroying that madman.

“I would even say – if I were asked to draw up a schematic blueprint of the Benefactor’s Machine, I would somehow, somehow find a way of incorporating your verses into the drawing,” I concluded.

But suddenly I noticed R’s eyes turn lusterless, his lips turn gray.

“What is it?”

“What, what! Oh… Oh, I’m simply tired of it. Everyone around talks of nothing but the sentence. I don’t want to hear about it any more. I just don’t want to!”

He frowned and rubbed the back of his head-that little box of his with its strange baggage that I did not understand. A pause. And then he found something in the box, pulled it out, opened it. His eyes glossed over with laughter as he jumped up.

“But for your Integral, I am composing… That will be… Oh, yes, that will be something!”

It was again the old R: thick, sputtering lips, spraying saliva, and a fountain of words. “You see” (“s” – a spray) “…that ancient legend about paradise… Why, it’s about us, about today. Yes! Just think. Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative. Those idiots chose freedom, and what came of it? Of course, for ages afterward they longed for the chains. The chains – you understand? That’s what world sorrow was about For ages! And only we have found the way of restoring happiness… No, wait listen further! The ancient God and we – side by side, at the same table. Yes! We have helped God ultimately to conquer the devil – for it was he who had tempted men to break the ban and get a taste of ruinous freedom, he, the evil serpent. And we, we’ve brought down our boot over his little head, and – cr-runch! Now everything is fine – we have paradise again. Again we are as innocent and simple-hearted as Adam and Eve. No more of that confusion about good and evil. Everything is simple – heavenly, childishly simple. The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell, the Guardians – all this is good, all this is sublime, magnificent, noble, elevated, crystally pure. Because it protects our unfreedom – that is, our happiness. The ancients would begin to talk and think and break their heads – ethical, unethical… Well, then. In short, what about such a paradisiac poem, eh? And, of course, in the most serious tone… You understand? Quite something, eh?”

Understand? It was simple enough. I remember thinking: such an absurd, asymmetrical face, yet such a dear, correct mind. This is why he is so close to me, the real me (I still consider my old self the true one; all of this today is, of course, only a sickness).

R evidently read these thoughts on my face. He put his arm around my shoulders and roared with laughter.

“Ah, you… Adam! Yes, incidentally, about Eve…

He fumbled in his pocket, took out a notebook, and turned the pages. “The day after tomorrow… no, in two days, O has a pink coupon to visit you. How do you feel about it? As before? Do you want her to…”

“Of course, naturally.”

“I’ll tell her so. She is a little shy herself, you see… What a business! With me, it is nothing, you know, merely a pink coupon, but with you… And she would not tell me who the fourth one is that broke into our triangle. Confess it now, you reprobate, who is it? Well?”

A curtain flew up inside me – the rustle of silk, a green bottle, lips… And inappropriately, to no purpose, the words broke out (if I had only restrained myself!): “Tell me, have you ever tasted nicotine or alcohol?”

R compressed his lips and threw me a sidelong look. I heard his thoughts with utmost clarity: You may be a friend, all right… still… And then his answer: “Well, how shall I put it? Actually, no. But I knew a certain woman…”

“I-330,” I shouted.

“So… you – you too? With her?” He filled with laughter, gulped, ready to spill over.

My mirror hung on the wall in such a way that I could see myself only across the table; from here, from the chair, I saw only my forehead and my eyebrows.

And now I – the real I – saw in the mirror the twisted, jumping line of eyebrows, and the real I heard a wild, revolting shout: “What ‘too’? What do you mean, ‘too’? No, I demand an answer!”

Gaping thick lips, bulging eyes. Then I – the real I – seized the other, the wild, shaggy, panting one, by the scruff of the neck. The real I said to R, “Forgive me, for the Benefactor’s sake. I am quite ill, I cannot sleep. I don’t know what is happening to me…”

A fleeting smile on the thick lips. “Yes, yes! I understand, I understand! It’s all familiar to me… theoretically, of course. Good-by!”

In the doorway he turned, bounced back toward me like a small black ball, and threw a book down on the table.

“My latest… I brought it for you – almost forgot it. Good-by…” The “b” sprayed at me, and he rolled out of the room.

I am alone. Or, rather, alone with that other “I.” I am sitting in the chair, legs crossed, watching with curiosity from some “there” how I – my own self – writhe in the bed.

Why, why is it that for three whole years O and R and I have had that fine, warm friendship, and now – a single word about the other one, about I-330… Is it possible that all this madness – love, jealousy – exists not only in those idiotic ancient books? And to think that I… Equations, formulas, figures, and… this! I don’t understand anything… anything at all… Tomorrow I shall go to R and tell him that…

No, it isn’t true, I will not go. Neither tomorrow, nor the day after tomorrow – I shall never go. I cannot, I don’t want to see him. It is the end! Our triangle is broken.

I am alone. Evening. A light mist. The sky is hidden behind a milky-golden veil. If only I could know what is there, above it! If only I could know: Who am I, what am I like?

Twelfth Entry

Topics: The Limitation of Infinity. An Angel. Reflections on Poetry

I have the constant feeling: I will recover, I can recover. I slept very well. None of those dreams or other morbid symptoms. Tomorrow dear O will come to me, and everything will be as simple, right, and limited as a circle. I do not fear this word “limitation.” The function of man’s highest faculty, his reason, consists precisely of the continuous limitation of infinity, the breaking up of infinity into convenient, easily digestible portions – differentials. This is precisely what lends my field, mathematics, its divine beauty. And it is the understanding of this beauty that the other one, I-330, lacks. However, this is merely in passing – a chance association.

All these thoughts – in time to the measured, regular clicking of the wheels of the underground train. I silently scanned the rhythm of the wheels and R’s poems (from the book he had given me yesterday). Then I became aware of someone cautiously bending over my shoulder from behind and peering at the opened page. Without turning, out of the merest corner of my eye, I saw the pink wide wing-ears, the double-bent… it was he! Reluctant to disturb him, I pretended not to notice. I cannot imagine how he got there; he did not seem to be in the car when I entered.

This incident, trivial in itself, had a particularly pleasant effect upon me; it strengthened me. How good it is to know that a vigilant eye is fixed upon you, lovingly protecting you against the slightest error, the slightest misstep. This may seem somewhat sentimental, but an analogy comes to my mind – the Guardian Angels that the ancients dreamed of. How many of the things they merely dreamed about have been realized in our life!

At the moment when I felt the Guardian Angel behind my back, I was enjoying a sonnet entitled “Happiness.” I think I will not be mistaken if I say that it is a poem of rare and profound beauty of thought. Here are its first four lines:

 

Eternally enamored two times two.

Eternally united in the passionate four,

Most ardent lovers in the world —

Inseparable two times two…

 

And so on – about the wise, eternal bliss of the multiplication table.

Every true poet is inevitably a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus, but only Columbus succeeded in discovering it. The multiplication table existed for centuries before R-13, yet it was only R-13 who found a new Eldorado in the virginal forest of figures. And indeed, is there any happiness wiser, more unclouded than the happiness of this miraculous world? Steel rusts. The ancient God created the old man, capable of erring – hence he erred himself. The multiplication able is wiser and more absolute than the ancient God: it never – do you realize the full meaning of the word? – it never errs. And there are no happier figures than those which live according to the harmonious, eternal laws of the multiplication table. No hesitations, no delusions. There is only one truth, and only one true way; this truth is two times two, and the true way – four. And would it not be an absurdity if these happily, ideally multiplied twos began to think of some nonsensical freedom – i.e., clearly, to error? To me it is axiomatic that R-13 succeeded in grasping the most fundamental, the most…

At this point I felt once more – first at the back of my head, then at my left ear – the want, delicate breath of my Guardian Angel. He had obviously noticed that the book on my lap was now dosed and my thoughts far away. Well, I was ready, there and then, to open all the pages of my mind to him; there was such serenity, such joy in this feeling. I remember: I turned and looked into his eyes with pleading insistence, but he did not understand, or did not wish to understand, and asked me nothing. Only one thing remains to me – to speak to you, my unknown readers, about everything. (At this moment you are as dear and near and unattainable to me as he was then.)

My reflections proceeded from the part to the whole: the part, R-13; the majestic whole, our Institute of State Poets and Writers. I wondered at the ancients who had never realized the utter absurdity of their literature and poetry. The enormous, magnificent power of the literary word was completely wasted. It’s simply ridiculous – everyone wrote anything he pleased. Just as ridiculous and absurd as the fact that the ancients allowed the ocean to beat dully at the shore twenty-four hours a day, while the millions of kilogrammometers of energy residing in the waves went only to heighten lovers’ feelings. But we have extracted electricity from the amorous whisper of the waves; we have transformed the savage, foam-spitting beast into a domestic animal; and in the same way we have tamed and harnessed the once wild element of poetry. Today, poetry is no longer the idle, impudent whistling of a nightingale; poetry is civic service, poetry is useful.

Take, for example, our famous “mathematical couplets.” Could we have learned in school to love the four rules of arithmetic so tenderly and so sincerely without them? Or “Thorns,” that classical image: the Guardians as the thorns on the rose, protecting the delicate flower of the State from rude contacts… Whose heart can be so stony as to remain unmoved at the sight of innocent childish lips reciting like a prayer the verse:

“The bad boy rudely sniffed the rose. But the steely thorn pricked bis nose. The mischief-maker cries, ‘Oh, Oh,’ And runs as fast as he can go,” and so on.

Or the Daily Odes to the Benefactor? Who, upon reading them, will not bow piously before the selfless labors of this Number of Numbers? Or the awesome “Red Flowers of Court Sentences”? Or the immortal tragedy “He Who Was Late to Work?” Or the guidebook “Stanzas on Sexual Hygiene”?

All of our life, in its entire complexity and beauty, has been engraved forever in the gold of words.

Our poets no longer soar in the empyrean; they have come down to earth; they stride beside us to the stern mechanical March of the Music Plant. Their lyre encompasses the morning scraping of electric toothbrushes and the dread crackle of the sparks in the Benefactor’s Machine; the majestic echoes of the Hymn to the One State and the intimate tinkle of the gleaming crystal chamberpot; the exciting rustle of dropping shades, the merry voices of the latest cookbook, and the scarcely audible whisper of the listening membranes in the streets.

Our gods are here, below, with us – in the office, the kitchen, the workshop, the toilet; the gods have become like us. Ergo, we have become as gods. And we shall come to you, my unknown readers on the distant planet, to make your life as divinely rational and precise as ours.