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.
Implosion is no invention in the conventional sense, but rather the renaissance of ancient knowledge, lost over the course of time.
Your mother is not crazy. Neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother. He is merely miscast in a play. He would have made the perfect knight in a different century, or a very good pagan prince in a time of heroes. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river, with the ability to do anything and finding nothing he wants to do.
The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence
I love the melodies in the Old Testament, how preachers highlight them when they read from the Scripture. But I was influenced forever by the New Testament. I love the Beatitudes, informing us that the meek shall inherit the earth.
There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past.
Accuracy of signal and free flow of information define sanity in my epistemology.
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