Explore "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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_ do not know any more 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 there that wrinkle before?) Steel gray eyes encircled by the shadow of a sleepless night. And behind that steel. I understand; I never before knew 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 poisoning. Poisoning with what? With a sip of that green poison or with her? It matters little. I write all this merely in order to demonstrate how strangely the precise and sharp human reason may become confused.