Tomorrow is the Day of Unanimity. She will certainly be there and I
shall see her, though from a distance. That distance will be painful
to me, for I must be, I am inevitably drawn, close to her, so that
her hands, her shoulder, her hair.... I long for even that pain....
Let it come.... Great Well-Doer! How absurd to desire pain! Who is
ignorant of the simple fact that pains are negative items which
reduce that sum total we call happiness? Consequently ... Well, no
"consequently" ... Emptiness.... Nakedness!
_The Same Evening._
Through the glass wall of the house I see a disquieting, windy,
feverishly pink, sunset. I move my armchair to avoid that pinkness
and turn over these pages, and I find I am forgetting that I write
this not for myself but for you unknown people whom I love and pity,
for you who still lag centuries behind, below. Let me tell you about
the Day of Unanimity, about that Great Day. I think that day for us
is what Easter was for the ancients. I remember I used to prepare an
hour-calendar the eve of that day; solemnly I would cross out every
time the figure of the hour elapsed; nearer by one hour! one hour
less to wait!... If I were certain that nobody would discover it, I
assure you I should now too, make out such a calendar and carry it
with me, and I should watch how many hours remain until tomorrow,
when I shall see, at least from a distance....
(I was interrupted. They brought me a new unif from the shop. As is
customary, new unifs are given to us for tomorrow's celebration.
Steps in the hall, exclamations of joy, noises.)
I shall continue; tomorrow I shall see the same spectacle which we
see year after year and which always awakes in us fresh emotions,
as though we saw it for the first time: an impressive throng of
piously lifted arms. Tomorrow is the day of the yearly election of
the Well-Doer. Tomorrow we shall again hand over to our Well-Doer
the keys to the impregnable fortress of our happiness. Certainly
this in no way resembles the disorderly, unorganized election-days
of the ancients, on which (it seems so funny!) they did not even
know in advance the result of the election. To build a state on some
non-discountable contingencies, to build blindly,--what could be
more nonsensical? Yet centuries were required to pass before this
was understood!
Needless to say, we in this respect as in all others have no place
for contingencies; nothing unexpected can happen. The elections
themselves have rather a symbolic meaning. They remind us that we
are a united, powerful organism of millions of cells, that--, to
use the language of the "gospel" of the ancients, we are a united
church. The history of the United State knows not a single case
in which upon this solemn day even a solitary voice has dared to
violate the magnificent unison.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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