Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [158]
“Primitive art, Egyptian, Greek, our own, is surely one and the same art in the course of the millennia and always remains in the singular. It is some thought, some assertion about life, which, in its all-embracing breadth, cannot be broken down into separate words, and when a grain of that force enters into the composition of some more complex mixture, this admixture of art outweighs the significance of all the rest and turns out to be the essence, the soul, and the foundation of what is depicted.”
5
“A slight cold, a cough, and probably a small fever. All day I’ve been catching my breath somewhere at the level of the throat, as if there is a lump there. Things are bad for me. It’s the aorta. The first warnings of heredity from my poor mama’s side, a lifelong story of heart ailment. Can it be true? So early? In that case, I’m not long for this world.
“It is a bit fumy in the room. Smells of ironing. Someone’s ironing and keeps adding hot, flaming coals from the still-burning stove to the coal iron, which clacks its lid like teeth. It reminds me of something. I can’t remember what. A sick man’s forgetfulness.
“Overjoyed that Anfim brought some nut-oil soap, they flew into a general laundering, and Shurochka hasn’t been looked after for two days. When I write, he gets under the table, sits on the crossbar between the legs, and, imitating Anfim, who takes him for a sleigh ride each time he comes, pretends that he’s also driving me in a sledge.
“When I get better, I must go to town to read up on the ethnography of the region and its history. I’m assured there is an excellent town library, put together from several rich donations. I want to write. I must hurry. Before I turn around, spring will be here. Then there will be no bothering with reading and writing.
“My headache keeps getting worse. I didn’t sleep well. I had a confused dream, one of those that you forget on the spot when you wake up. The dream left my head, in my consciousness there remained only the cause of my waking up. I was awakened by a woman’s voice, which I heard in my sleep, which in my sleep resounded in the air. I remembered its sound and, reproducing it in my memory, mentally went through all the women I know, searching for which of them might be the owner of that chesty, moist voice, soft from heaviness. It did not belong to any. I thought that my excessive habituation to Tonya might stand between us and dull my hearing in relation to her. I tried to forget she was my wife and moved her image further off, to a distance sufficient for clarifying the truth. No, it was not her voice either. So it remained unclarified.
“Incidentally, about dreams. It is an accepted notion that we tend to dream at night of something that has strongly impressed us in the daytime, when we were awake. My observations are the opposite.
“I’ve noticed more than once that it is precisely things we have barely noticed in the daytime, thoughts not brought to clarity, words spoken without feeling and left without attention, that return at night clothed in flesh and blood, and become the subjects of dreams, as if in compensation for our neglect of them in the daytime.”
6
“A clear, frosty night. Extraordinary brightness and wholeness of the visible. Earth, air, moon, stars, fettered together, riveted by frost. In the park, the distinct shadows of trees lie across the alleys, seeming carved in relief. It seems all the time as if some dark figures are ceaselessly crossing the path in various places. Big stars like blue mica lamps hang in the forest among the branches. The whole sky is strewn with little stars like a summer meadow with chamomile.
“Our evening talks about Pushkin continue. We discussed his lycée poems in the first volume. How much depended on the choice of meter!
“In the poems with long lines, his youthful ambition did not go beyond the limits of Arzamas,