Whatever happened to the past, when I wa...

Whatever happened to the past, when I was young and happy and intelligent, when I dreamed wonderful dreams and thought great thoughts, when my life and my future were shining with hope? What happened to it? We barely begin to live, and all of a sudden we’re old and boring and lazy and useless and unhappy. This town has been here for two hundred years. It has a hundred thousand people in it, and not one of them has ever amounted to a thing. Each one is just like all the others: they eat, drink, sleep, and then they die …. more of them are born, and they eat, drink, and sleep too, and then because they’re bored, they gossip, they drink, they gamble, they sue each other, the wives cheat on the husbands and the husbands lie, they pretend they don’t see anything or hear anything, and the children end up just as aimless and dead as their parents. The present is awful.

But when I think of the future, then I feel better. I feel happy and free. There’s a light in the distance. I can see freedom. And my children and I will be free from laziness, from kvass, from goose with cabbage, from after-dinner naps, from living like insects.