IV
Jane was right to bring me here. Point No.┬а1, no one is likely to come across me here and joyously proclaim my resurrection from the dead. Point No.┬а2, this is about the most interesting place in the world to be from my point of view. A kind of free and easy laboratory where everyone is trying experiments of the most dangerous kind. The whole world seems concerned with Russia from a purely political point of view. Economics, starvation, morals, lack of liberty, diseased and decadent childrenтБатАКтБатАж etc.
But amazing things are sometimes born out of vice and filth and anarchy. The whole trend of Russian thought in art is extraordinaryтБатАКтБатАж part of it the most utter childish drivel you ever heardтБатАФand yet wonderful gleams peeping throughтБатАФlike shining flesh through a beggarтАЩs ragsтБатАКтБатАж
The Nameless BeastтБатАФCollective Man. Did you ever see that plan for a monument to the Communist Revolution? The Colossus of Iron? I tell you, it stirs the imagination.
MachineryтБатАФan Age of Machinery.тБатАКтБатАж How the Bolsheviks worship anything to do with machineryтБатАФand how little they know about it! ThatтАЩs why itтАЩs so wonderful to them, I suppose. Imagine a real mechanic of Chicago composing a dynamic poem describing his city as тАЬтАж┬аbuilt upon a screw! Electro dynamo mechanical city! Spiral-shaped on a steel disc. At every stroke of the hour turning round itselfтБатАФFive thousand skyscrapersтБатАКтБатАжтАЭ Anything more alien from the spirit of America!
And yetтБатАФdo you ever see a thing when youтАЩre too close to it? ItтАЩs the people who donтАЩt know machinery who see its soul and its meaning. The Nameless Beast.тБатАКтБатАж My Beast?тБатАКтБатАж I wonder.
Collective ManтБатАФforming himself in turn into a vast machine. The same herd instinct that saved the race of old coming out again in a different form.
LifeтАЩs becoming too difficultтБатАФtoo dangerousтБатАФfor the individual. What was it Dostoevsky says in one of his books?
тАЬThe flock will collect again and submit once more, and then it will be forever, forever. We will give them a quiet modest happiness.тАЭ
Herd instinct.тБатАКтБатАж I wonder.