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416 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2016
Those sleeping peacefully in the house will die. Without knowing what a terrifying precipice our happiness hangs over. They will wake up, live out the events destined for them, and then the end will come. It is obvious, after all, where the course lies. It awaits me, too. But most likely it awaits my grandmother before the others; I still see no alarm in her eyes. Surely she has a hunch that our well-being is illusory, that it is only for the moment.
Paradise is the absence of time. If time stops, there will be no more events. Nonevents will remain. The pine trees will remain, brown and gnarled below, smooth and amber at the top. The gooseberries by the fence will not go anywhere, either. The squeak of the gate, a child’s muffled crying at the next dacha, the first pounding of rain on the veranda roof… all the things that changes in government and the falls of empires do not wipe out. Whatever happens outside history is timeless, liberated.
‘Why is it you keep writing?’
‘I’m describing things, sensations. People. I write every day now, hoping to save them from oblivion.’
‘God’s world is too great to count on success with that.’
‘You know, if each person were to describe his own sliver of that world, even if it’s small . . . Although why, really, is it small? You can always find someone whose field of view is broad enough.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as an aviator’
The time that had given birth to him remained somewhere far away; maybe it was even gone forever. He is in a different time now, with his previous experience and previous habits, and he needs either to forget them or recreate an entire lost world, something that’s not simple at all.
The main thing is not to overvalue events as such. I do not think they come into being as something internally particular to a person. After all, they are not a soul that determines personality and is inseparable from the body during life. There is no inseparability in events. They do not compose a part of a person: to the contrary, a person becomes part of them. A person falls into them as people fall under a train – and just have a look at what’s left of you after that.
Those who created the Solovetsky hell had deprived people of what was human, but Robinson, after all, did the opposite: he humanized all the nature surrounding him, making it a continuation of himself. They destroyed every memory of civilization but he created civilization from nothing. From memory.