We / Мы. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Начало книги

I shall simply copy, word for word, the proclamation that appeared today in the One State Gazette:

I write this, and I feel: my cheeks are burning. Yes, to integrate the grandiose cosmic equation. Yes, to unbend the wild, primitive curve and straighten it to a tangent – an asymptote – a straight line. For the line of the One State is the straight line. The great, divine, exact, wise straight line – the wisest of all lines.

I, D-503, Builder of the Integral, am only one of the mathematicians of the One State. My pen, accustomed to figures, does not know how to create the music of assonances and rhymes. I shall merely attempt to record what I see and think, or, to be more exact, what we think (precisely so – we, and let this We be the title of my record). But since this record will be a derivative of our life, of the mathematically perfect life of the One State, will it not be, of itself, and regardless of my will or skill, a poem? It will. I believe, I know it.

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