Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/69

Rh RECORD ELEVEN

No, I Can’t; Let It Be without Headings!

Evening. It is somewhat foggy. The sky is covered with a milky-golden tissue, and one cannot see what is there, beyond, on the heights. The ancients “knew” that the greatest, bored skeptic—their god—lived there. We know that crystalline, blue, naked, indecent Nothing is there. I no longer know what is there. I have learned too many things of late. Knowledge, self-confident knowledge, which is sure that it is faultless, is faith. I had firm faith in myself; I believed that I knew all about myself. But then I look in the mirror. And for the first time in my life, yes, for the first time in my life I see clearly, precisely, consciously and with surprise, I see myself as some “him”! I am “he.” Frowning, black, straight brows; between them, like a scar, there is a vertical wrinkle. (Was that wrinkle there before?) Steel-gray eyes encircled by the shadow of a sleepless night. And behind that steel I understand; I never knew before what there was behind that steel. From there (this “there” is at once so near and so infinitely distant!) I look at myself—at “him.” And I know surely that “he” with his straight brows is a stranger, that I meet him here for the first time in my life. The real I is not he.

No. Period. All this is nonsense. And all these foolish emotions are only delirium, the result of last night’s poison-