176
PARTISAN REVIEW
brags about it: 'See what great torments I withstand! See
wha~
untold shame and humiliation I suffer! Who can compare with me?'
See, we don't merely suffer torments. It's more than that, we love
these torments too, we love torment for its own sake. . . . We want
to be tortured, we are eager, we yearn for it. . . . Persecution pre–
serves us, keeps us alive. Without it, we couldn't exist.... Did you
ever see a community of Jews that was not suffering? I've never
seen one. A Jew without suffering
is
an abnormal creature, hardly
a Jew at all, half a
goy .
. . .
That's what I mean; it's just such
'heroism' that shows our weakness ... suffering, suffering, suffering!
Everything is rotten around suffering. . . . Please notice, I said
around,
not
in
suffering. There's a tremendous difference.... Every–
thing, everything around it rots:· history, life itself, all actions, cus–
toms, the group, the individual, literature, culture, folk songs ... all
in all! The world grows narrow, cramped, and upside down. A world
of darkness, perversion, and contradiction. Sorrow is priced higher
than joy, pain easier to understand than happiness, wrecking better
than building, slavery preferred to redemption, dream before reality,
hope more than the future, faith before common sense, and so on
to the end of all perversions . . . it's horrible! A new psychology is
created, a kind of moonlight psychology.... The night has its own
special psychology, quite different from the day's. I don't mean the
psychology of a man at night, that's something separate, but the
psychology of night itself. You may not have noticed it, perhaps,
but it's there, it's there. I know it. I sense it every time I stand guard.
The whole world behaves quite differently too in the day, nature
moves in a different way, every grass, every stone, every scent, all
different, different...."
"Yudka," the chairman cut in, and spoke half jesting, half
beseeching, "your thoughts are very fine, but have pity on us. Why
did you have the committee convened?"
"Wait, wait," said Yudka hastily, "I haven't come to the main
thing. You don't know yet . . . I have something in mind, I have
something in mind.... You'll soon see. Just be patient a little...."
"Let him talk," spoke up one of the committee, "let him talk."
"But," the chairman began dubiously.
Just then Yudka unintentionally
1
without thinking-, shouted 4t
him:
"Quiet!"
