Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.
Interpretation
This quote reflects a departure from rationality into a more chaotic and abstract existence.
Yevgeny Zamyatin's quote highlights the shift from a clear and logical understanding of reality to a realm filled with confusion and irrationality. The metaphor of 'square roots of minus one' illustrates the concept of imaginary numbers, symbolizing how he has become immersed in a complex and perhaps disturbing world that defies straightforward reasoning.
In practice
In a philosophical seminar discussing the nature of reality.
The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox - the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.
Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.
The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...
The lilac branches are bowed under the weight of the flowers: blooming is hard, and the most important thing is - to bloom. (βA Story About The Most Important Thingβ)
A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.
Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality waiting to be shaped.
The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.
Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, thus affording them the possibility of dignity; they loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, thus confronting them with the possibility of insignificance.
Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops
The principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites-Acquiescence and violence -while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both.
In a word, to grow old in heaven is to grow young.
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