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things were read (#293): The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge

What is consciousness? Does it appear in us like a star in the pale twilight sky, invisibly, undeniably? He who, the day before, had lived in a fog now saw the truth. "It is that, it is contact with truth." Truth was simple, near as a young woman yo u take in your arms and say "Darling!" and then you discover her eyes, where light and darkness blend. He possessed truth forever. In November '17 another Ryzhik--yet was it the same?--went to a great printing plant in Vasili-Ostrov with the Red Guard, and requisitioned it in the name of the Party. Before the great machines which produce books and papers he exclaimed: "Now, comrades, the days of falsehood are done! Mankind will print nothing but the truth!" The owner of the plant, a fat, pale, yellow-lipped gentleman, cruelly put in: "That, gentlemen, I defy you to do!" and Ryzhik wanted to kill him on the spot, but we were not bringing barbarism, we were putting an end to war and murder, we were bringing proletarian justice. "We shall see, citizen; in any case, I inform you that there are no more gentlemen, now or henceforth..." The man he had been in those days was over forty, a hard age for a worker, but he felt himself an adolescent again: "Coming into power," he said, "has made us all twenty years younger..." (p244)

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things were read (#364): Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

But do you ever experience a sort of diluted, personalised version of that feeling, as if your own life, your own world, has slowly but perceptibly become an uglier place? Or even a sense that while you used to be in step with the cultural discourse, you're not anymore, and you feel yourself adrift from the world of ideas, alienated, with no intellectual home? Maybe it is about our specific historical moment, or maybe it's just about getting older and disillusioned, and it happens to everyone. When I look back on what we were like when we first met, I don't think we were really wrong about anything, except about ourselves. The ideas were right, but the mistake was that we thought we mattered. Well, we've both had that particular error ground out of us in different ways-- me by achieving precisely nothing in over a decade of adult life, and you (if you'll forgive me) by achieving as much as you possibly could and still not making one grain of difference to the smooth functioning of the capitalist system. When we were young, we thought our responsibilities stretched out to encompass the earth and everything that lived on it. And now we have to content ourselves with trying not to let down our loved ones, trying not to use too much plastic, and in your case trying to write an interesting book once every few years. So far so good on that front. (p220)

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things were read (#363): Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge:

I informed my father of my decision not to become a student. The timing was lucky: a rotten end of the month. "What are you going to do then?" "Work. I'll study without being a student." To tell the truth, I was too afraid of sounding pompous or of starting a great disputation of ideas, to dare to reply, "I want to fight as you yourself have fought, as everyone must fight throughout life. I can see quite clearly that you have been beaten. I shall try to have more strength or better luck. There is nothing else for it." That is pretty near what I was thinking. (p12)

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