We : 無料・フリー素材/写真
We / solarisgirl
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 2.1 |
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| 説明 | After reading 1984, and then Brave New World, this came up in the suggestions list. I was hesitant to read this as I was unsure if I could follow a Russian book, let alone one written in 1921. But as usual, one page led to another and I got through it without it seeming tedious! Loved the story and Zamyatin's descriptions of nature are so beautiful! Bit like Pasternak maybe?Here are some nice bits from the book:It is for you to place the beneficial yoke of reason round the necks of the unknown beings who inhabit other planets—still living, it may be, in the primitive state known as freedom. If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically infallible happiness, we shall be obliged to force them to be happy.No matter how limited their powers of reason might have been, still they must have understood that living like that was just murder, a capital crime—except it was slow, day-by-day murder. The government (or humanity) would not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time. To kill one man—that is, to subtract 50 years from the sum of all human lives—that was a crime; but to subtract from the sum of all human lives 50,000,000 years—that was not a crime! No, really, isn’t that funny? This problem in moral math could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old Number today, but they couldn’t solve it. All their Kants together couldn’t solve it (because it never occurred to one of their Kants to construct a system of scientific ethics—that is, one based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication).“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 him of freedom.And then to her, “I hate the fog. I’m afraid of the fog.”“That means you love it. You’re afraid of it because it’s stronger than you,you hate it because you’re afraid of it, you love it because you can’t master it.You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.”The whole day from the earliest morning—wasn’t it fullof the most improbable things, wasn’t it just like that ancient sickness called dreaming? And so what difference does it make, one absurdity more or less? Besides, I am certain that sooner or later I’m going to be able to fit any absurdity into a syllogism. I find that comforting, and I hope it comforts you.“Okay … take a flat plane, a surface, take this mirror, for instance. And the two of us are on this surface, see, and we squint our eyes against the sun, and there’s a blue electric spark in the tubing, and—there—the shadow of an aero just flashed by. But only on the surface, only for a second. But just imagine now that some fire has softened this impenetrable surface and nothing skims along the top of it any longer—everything penetrates into it, inside, into that mirror world that we peer into with such curiosity, like children—and I assure you, children aren’t so dumb. The plane has taken on mass, body, the world, and it’s all inside the mirror, inside you: the sun, the wash from the aero’s propeller, and your trembling lips, and somebody else’s, too. And, you understand, the cold mirror reflects, throws back, while this absorbs, and the trace left by everything lasts forever. Let there be only once a barely noticeable wrinkle on somebody’s face, and it’s in you forever; once you heard a drop fall in silence —and you hear it right now."Man ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that Wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals….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. And the natural path from nullity to greatness is this: Forget that you’re a gram and feel yourself a millionth part of a ton.They say there are flowers that bloom only once every hundred years. Why shouldn’t there be some that bloom only once every thousand, every ten thousand years? Maybe we just haven’t heard about them up to now because this very day is that once-in-a-thousand-years.“My dear, you are a mathematician. You’re even more, you’re a philosopher of mathematics. So do this for me: Tell me the final number.”“The what? I … I don’t understand. What final number?”“You know—the last one, the top, the absolute biggest.”“But, I-330, that’s stupid. Since the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final one?”“And how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one. The number of revolutions is infinite. The last one—that’s for children. Infinity frightens children, and it’s essential that children get a good night’s sleep….”“That’s silly! A completely infantile question. Tell something to children, tell them the whole thing right to the end, and they’ll still ask: Then what? What comes next?”“Children are the only bold philosophers. And bold philosophers will always be children. So you’re right, it’s a child’s question, just as it should be: Then what?”“No, run upstairs! You’ll be cured there—they’ll stuffyou tight with good rich happiness and when you’re full, you’ll dream peaceful organized dreams, snoring in time with everyone—can’t you hear that great symphony of snores? You silly people—they want to rid you of these question marks that squirm like worms and gnaw at you like worms. And here you stand and listen to me. Get upstairs quick to the Great Operation! What difference is it to you if I stay on here alone? What difference is it to you if I don’t want others to do the wanting for me? If I want to want for myself? If I want the impossible?”“Listen!” I grabbed my neighbor. “Listen to me, I tell you! You have to tell me this. There where your finite universe ends—what’s there … beyond?”Edit [May, 2022]:I'm so excited because one of my favourite bands Arcade Fire just released their new album and it's named after this book! youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nAtgcUtF2_SXk31Y46BMhfr...Just makes me smile when I see the overlaps between the music and books I like, say like Radiohead's '2+2=5' and Orwell's '1984', - really hard and heavy song, and the reference to the book just added that extra layer of beauty to it. And now, Arcade Fire and We. Idly wondering what Zamyatin would have thought of this album... |
| 撮影日 | 2018-10-27 10:01:19 |
| 撮影者 | solarisgirl |
| タグ | |
| 撮影地 | |
| カメラ | 808 PureView , Nokia |
| 露出 | 0.02 sec (1/50) |
| 開放F値 | f/2.4 |
| 焦点距離 | 8 mm |