It was a state in which thought lost its direction and started to circle, like the compass needle at the magnetic pole; until finally it cut loose from its axis and travelled freely in space, like a bunch of light in the night; and until it seemed that all thoughts and all sensations, even pain and joy itself, were only the spectrum lines of the same ray of light, disintegrating in the prisma of consciousness.
Rubashov wandered through his cell.
In old days he would have shamefacedly denied himself this sort of childish musing.
Now he was not ashamed.
In death the metaphysical became real.
He stopped at the window and leaned his forehead against the pane.
Over the machine-gun tower one could see a patch of blue.
It was pale, and reminded him of that particular blue which he had seen overhead when as a boy he lay on the grass in his father’s park, watching the poplar branches slowly moving against the sky.
Apparently even a patch of blue sky was enough to cause the “oceanic state”.
He had read that, according to the latest discoveries of astrophysics, the volume of the world was finite—though space had. no boundaries, it was self-contained, like the surface of a sphere.
He had never been able to understand that; but now he felt an urgent desire to understand.
He now also remembered where he had read about it: during his first arrest in Germany, comrades had smuggled a sheet of the illegally printed Party organ into the cell; at the top were three columns about a strike in a spinning-mill; at the bottom of a column, as a stopgap, was printed in tiny letters the discovery that the universe was finite, and halfway through it the page was torn off.
He had never found out what had been in the torn-off part.
Rubashov stood by the window and tapped on the empty wall with his pince-nez.
As a boy he had really meant to study astronomy, and now for forty years he had been doing something else.
Why had not the Public Prosecutor asked him:
“Defendant Rubashov, what about the infinite?”
He would not have been able to answer—and there, there lay the real source of his guilt. ...
Could there be a greater?
When he had read that newspaper notice, then also alone in his cell, with joints still sore from the last bout of torturing, he had fallen into a queer state of exaltation—the “oceanic sense” had swept him away.
Afterwards he had been ashamed of himself.
The Party disapproved of such states.
It called them petit-bourgeois mysticism, refuge in the ivory tower.
It called them “escape from the task”, “desertion of the class struggle”.
The “oceanic sense” was counter-revolutionary.
For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on the earth.
The Party taught one how to do it. The infinite was a politically suspect quantity, the “I” a suspect quality.
The Party did not recognize its existence. The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.
The Party denied the free will of the individual—and at the same time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives—and at the same time it demanded that he should constantly choose the right one.
It denied his power to distinguish good and evil—and at the same time it spoke pathetically of guilt and treachery.
The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could not be stopped or influenced—and the Party demanded that the wheel should revolt against the clockwork and change its course.
There was somewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out.
For forty years he had fought against economic fatality.
It was the central ill of humanity, the cancer which was eating into its entrails.
It was there that one must operate; the rest of the healing process would follow.
All else was dilettantism, romanticism, charlatanism.
One cannot heal a person mortally ill by pious exhortations.
The only solution was the surgeon’s knife and his cool calculation.
But wherever the knife had been applied, a new sore had appeared in place of the old.
And again the equation did not work out.
For forty years he had lived strictly in accordance with the vows of his order, the Party.
He had held to the rules of logical calculation.
He had burnt the remains of the old, illogical morality from his consciousness with the acid of reason.
He had turned away from the temptations of the silent partner, and had fought against the “oceanic sense” with all his might.
And where had it landed him?
Premises of unimpeachable truth had led to a result which was completely absurd; Ivanov’s and Gletkin’s irrefutable deductions had taken him straight into the weird and ghostly game of the public trial.
Perhaps it was not suitable for a man to think every thought to its logical conclusion.
Rubashov stared through the bars of the window at the patch of blue above the machine-gun tower.
Looking back over his past, it seemed to him now that for forty years he had been running amuck—the running-amuck of pure reason.
Perhaps it did not suit man to be completely freed from old bonds, from the steadying brakes of