the present and the past…
“But why impassable?” (What white teeth!) “A bridge can be thrown across an abyss. Just think: drums, battalions, ranks – all this has also existed in the past; and, consequently…”
“But of course!” I cried. (What an astonishing coincidence of ideas: she spoke almost my own words, the words I had written down before our walk.) “You understand, even ideas. And this is because nobody is ‘one,’ but ‘one of.’ We are so alike…”
She: “Are you sure?”
I saw her eyebrows raised to her temples at a sharp angle, like the pointed horns of an X, and again I was confused. I glanced right, left, and…
On my right – she, slender, sharp, stubbornly pliant, like a whip, I-330 (I could see her number now); on my left – O, altogether different, all curves, with that childish fold on her wrist; and at the other end of our row, a male number I did not know – strange, doubly bent somehow, like the letter S. All of us so different…
That one on the right, I-330, seemed to have intercepted my flustered glance, and with a sigh she said, “Yes… Alas!”
Actually, this “alas” was entirely appropriate. But again there was that something in her face, or in her voice… And with a sharpness unusual for me, I said, “No reason for ‘Alas.’ Science progresses, and it is obvious that, if not now, then in fifty or a hundred years…”
“Even everyone’s noses…”
“Yes,” I almost shouted, “noses. If there is any ground for envy, no matter what it is… If I have a button-nose and another…”
“Oh, your nose is ‘classical,’ as they used to say in olden times. But your hands… No, let us see, let us see your hands!”
I detest to have anyone look at my hands: all hairy, shaggy – a stupid atavism. I held out my hand and said, as indifferently as I could, “An ape’s hands.”
She glanced at my hands, then at my face. “A most interesting conjunction.” She weighed me with her eyes as on a scale, and the horns flicked again at the corners of her eyebrows.
“He is registered with me.” O-90’s lips opened rosily, with eager joy.
I wished she had kept silent – this was altogether out of place. Generally, this dear O… how shall I put it… her tongue is wrongly timed; the speed of the tongue should always be some seconds behind the speed of thought, but certainly not the other way around.
At the end of the avenue, the bell on the Accumulator Tower was loudly striking seventeen. The personal hour was over. I-330 was leaving with the S-shaped male number. His face somehow inspired respect, and now it seemed familiar. I must have met him somewhere, but where?
In parting, I-330 said with another of her X-smiles, “Come to auditorium 112 the day after tomorrow.”
I shrugged. “If I am assigned to that auditorium…”
And she, with an odd certainty, “You will be.”
The woman affected me as unpleasantly as an irresolvable irrational member that has somehow slipped into an equation. And I was glad to remain for at least a few moments alone with dear O.
Hand in hand, we crossed four lines of avenues. At the corner she had to turn right, and I, left.
“I’d like so much to come to you today and let down the blinds. Today, right now…” O timidly raised her round, blue-crystal eyes to me.
How funny she is. What could I say to her? She had come to me only the day before, and she knew as well as I did that our next sexual day was the day after tomorrow. It was simply a case of her usual “words ahead of thought” – like the occasional (and sometimes damaging) premature supply of a spark to a motor.
Before we parted, I kissed her lovely blue eyes, unshadowed by a single cloud, two – no, let me be precise – three times.
Third Entry
Topics: Coat. Wall. Tables
I have just looked over what I had written yesterday, and I see that I did not express myself clearly enough. Of course, it is all entirely clear to any of us. But perhaps you, the unknown readers to whom the Integral will bring my notes, have reached only that page in the great book of civilization that our ancestors read some nine hundred years ago. Perhaps you do not know even about such elementary things as the Table of Hours, the Personal Hour, the Maternity Norm, the Green Wall, and the Benefactor. It seems to me ridiculous yet very difficult to speak about all this. It is as if a writer of, say, the twentieth century had to explain in his novel the meaning of “coat,” or “apartment,” or “wife.” Yet, if his novel were to be translated for savages, how could he avoid explaining what a “coat” meant?
I am certain that a savage would look at the “coat” and wonder, “What is it for? It’s only a hindrance.” It seems to me that your response may be exactly the same when I tell you that none of us has been beyond the Green Wall since the Two Hundred Years’ War.
But, my dear readers, a man must think, at least a little. It helps. After all, it is clear that the entire history of mankind, insofar as we know it, is the history of transition from nomadic to increasingly settled forms of existence. And does it not follow that the most settled form (ours) is at the same time the most perfect (ours)? People rushed about from one end of the earth to the other only in prehistoric times, when there were nations, wars, commerce, discoveries of all sorts of Americas. But who needs that now? What for?
I admit, the habit of such settled existence was not achieved easily, or all at once. During the Two Hundred Years’ War, when all the roads fell into ruin and were overgrown with grass, it must at first have seemed extremely inconvenient to live in cities cut off from one another by green jungles. But what of it? After man’s tail dropped off, it must have been quite difficult for him at first to learn to drive off flies without its aid. In the beginning he undoubtedly missed his tail. But now – can you imagine yourself with a tail? Or can you imagine yourself in the street naked, without a coat? (For you may still be trotting about in “coats.”) And so it is with me: I cannot imagine a city that is not dad in a Green Wall; I cannot imagine a life that is not regulated by the figures of our Table.
The Table… At this very moment, from the wall in my room, its purple figures on a field of gold stare tenderly and sternly into my eyes. Involuntarily, my mind turns to what the ancients called an “icon,” and I long to compose poems or prayers (which are the same thing). Oh, why am I not a poet, to render fitting praise to the Table, the heart and pulse of the One State!
As schoolchildren we all read (perhaps you have, too) that greatest literary monument to have come down to us from ancient days – “The Railway Guide.” But set it side by side with our Table, and it will be as graphite next to a diamond: both consist of the same element – carbon – yet how eternal, how transparent is the diamond, how it gleams! Whose breath will fail to quicken as he rushes clattering along the pages of “The Railway Guide”? But our Table of Hours! Why, it transforms each one of us into a figure of steel, a six-wheeled hero of a mighty epic poem. Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the same hour and the same moment, we – millions of us – get up as one. At the same hour, in million-headed unison, we start work; and in million-headed unison we end it And, fused into a single million-handed body, at the same second, designated by the Table, we lift our spoons to our mouths. At the same second, we come out for our walk, go to the auditorium, go to
