Status Updates From Drugie życie

"Their life" was falling apart, turning into something fragmented, a mosaic in a dream; a dream is always fragmentary, whereas waking reality is a unified whole.

She was the ill-omened starting point from which was unwound the whole skein of disaster --like the blizzard in Pushkin's "The Captain's Daughter which develops out of an almost invisible little cloud.

The little old man had been an utter little nobody at the time (1917), a speck of dust in a tornado-yet fifty-three years had gone by and by some strange quirk of fortune that little speck had survived, was still dancing in a ray of sunlight, while all else around him had been obliterated, swaps away... How did he survive?

Irina asked: Mama, happiness--what is it?... An evening like this in the forest, the three of us on skis --that's happiness. Do you see? That's what it is.

It was the list of names of the secret informers working for the Moscow division of the czarist police during the period from 1910 right up to the February Revolution of 1917. The material was, of course, priceless, because all the records of the czarist secret police had been destroyed.

If everything begins and ends with chemistry, why was there such pain? Because that sort of pain wasn't chemistry, was it? And their life, which had suddenly been extinguish like a burnout light bulb--had that simply been a combination of formulae?

The individual is the thread stretching through time, the supersensitive nerve of history that can be teased out and separated--and from which one can then learn a great deal. Man is never reconciled with death, because immediately planted in him is a sense that the thread of which he forms a part is endless.

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To her the historian's job was rather like that of the policeman who was stationed outside the entrance of the local movie theatre to keep order whenever a film was being premiered: to ensure that the epochs and the nations didn't get mixed up or change places, that the great men didn't try pushing ahead in the line, didn't quarrel, and didn't try to get a ticket to immorality out of turn.