It is very strange: while I was writing today
of the loftiest summit of human history, all the while I breathed the purest mountain air of thought, but within me it was and remains cloudy, cobwebby, and there is a kind of cross-like, four-pawed X. Or perhaps it is my paws and I feel like that only because they are always before my eyes, my hairy paws. I don’t like to talk about them. I dislike them. They are a trace of a primitive epoch. Is it possible that there is in me...?
I wanted to strike out all this because it trespasses on the limits of my synopsis. But then I decided: no, I shall not! Let this diary give the curve of the most imperceptible vibrations of my brain, like a precise seismograph, for at times such vibrations serve as forewarnings.... Certainly this is absurd! This certainly should be stricken out; we have conquered all the elements; catastrophes are not possible any more.
Now everything is clear to me. The peculiar feeling inside is a result of that very same square situation of which I spoke in the beginning. There is no X in me. There can be none. I am simply afraid lest some X will be left in you, my unknown readers. I believe you will understand that it is harder for me to write than it ever was for any author throughout human history. Some of them wrote for contemporaries, some for the future generations but none of them ever wrote for their ancestors, or beings like their primitive, distant ancestors.
RECORD SIX
An Accident
The Cursed “It’s Clear”
Twenty-four Hours
I must repeat, I made it my duty to write concealing nothing. Therefore I must point out now that sad as it may be, the process of hardening and crystallization of life has evidently not been completed even here in our State. A few steps remain to be made before we reach the ideal. The ideal (it’s clear), is to be found where nothing happens, but here.... I will give you an example: in the State paper I read that in two days the holiday of Justice will be celebrated on the Plaza of the Cube. This means that again some Number has impeded the smooth run of the great State machine. Again something that was not foreseen, or forecalculated happened.
Besides, something happened to me. True, it occurred during the personal hour, that is during the time specifically assigned to unforeseen circumstances, yet....
At about sixteen (to be exact, ten minutes to sixteen), I was at home. Suddenly the telephone: “D-503?”—a woman’s voice.
“Yes.”