Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [43]
“You’re talented … And talent is … not like everybody else … You must know something … Tell me something … Reassure me.”
“Well, what can I say?” Yura said, fidgeted uneasily on the chair, got up, paced the room, and sat down again. “First, tomorrow you’ll get better—there are signs, I’ll stake my life on it. And then—death, consciousness, faith in resurrection … You want to know my opinion as a natural scientist? Maybe some other time? No? Right now? Well, you know best. Only it’s hard to do it like this, straight off.”
And he gave her a whole impromptu lecture, surprised himself at the way it came out of him.
“Resurrection. The crude form in which it is affirmed for the comfort of the weakest is foreign to me. And I’ve always understood Christ’s words about the living and the dead in a different way. Where will you find room for all these hordes gathered over thousands of years? The universe won’t suffice for them, and God, the good, and meaning will have to take themselves out of the world. They’ll be crushed in this greedy animal stampede.
“But all the time one and the same boundlessly identical life fills the universe and is renewed every hour in countless combinations and transformations. Here you have fears about whether you will resurrect, yet you already resurrected when you were born, and you didn’t notice it.
“Will it be painful for you, does tissue feel its own disintegration? That is, in other words, what will become of your consciousness? But what is consciousness? Let’s look into it. To wish consciously to sleep means sure insomnia, the conscious attempt to feel the working of one’s own digestion means the sure upsetting of its nervous regulation. Consciousness is poison, a means of self-poisoning for the subject who applies it to himself. Consciousness is a light directed outwards, consciousness lights the way before us so that we don’t stumble. Consciousness is the lit headlights at the front of a moving locomotive. Turn their light inwards and there will be a catastrophe.
“And so, what will become of your consciousness? Yours. Yours. But what are you? There’s the whole hitch. Let’s sort it out. What do you remember about yourself, what part of your constitution have you been aware of? Your kidneys, liver, blood vessels? No, as far as you can remember, you’ve always found yourself in an external, active manifestation, in the work of your hands, in your family, in others. And now more attentively. Man in other people is man’s soul. That is what you are, that is what your conscience breathed, relished, was nourished by all your life. Your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what then? You have been in others and you will remain in others. And what difference does it make to you that later it will be called memory? It will be you, having entered into the composition of the future.
“Finally, one last thing. There’s nothing to worry about. There is no death. Death is not in our line. But you just said ‘talent,’ and that’s another thing, that is ours, that is open to us. And talent, in the highest, broadest sense, is the gift of life.
“There shall be no more death, says John the Theologian,2 and just listen to the simplicity of his argumentation. There shall be no more death, because the former things have passed. It’s almost the same as: there shall be no more death, because we’ve already seen all that, it’s old and we’re tired of it, and now we need something new, and this new thing is eternal life.”
He paced up and down the room while he spoke. “Sleep,” he said, going to the bed and putting his hands on Anna Ivanovna’s head. Several minutes went by. Anna Ivanovna began to fall asleep.
Yura quietly left the room and told Egorovna to send the nurse to the bedroom. “Devil knows,” he thought, “I’m turning into some sort of quack. Casting spells, healing by the laying on of hands.”
The next day Anna Ivanovna felt better.
4
Anna Ivanovna contrived to improve. In the middle of December she tried getting up, but was still very weak. She was advised to have a good long stay