LITERATURE, REVOLUTION AND ENTROPY
373
you the day and the month. Still others spell it out letter by letter.
But
if
we go one stage beyond the alphabet and articulate our
answer, this is what we get:
Two dead, dark stars collide with a deafening but unheard
crash and spark into life a new star: that's revolution. A molecule
breaks loose from its orbit, invades a neighboring atomic universe
and gives birth to a new chemical element: that's revolution. With
one book Lobachevsky cleaves the centuries-old walls of the Euclid–
ean world and opens the way to the infinities of non-Euclidean
space: that's revolution.
Revolution is everywhere and in all things; it is infinite, there
is no final revolution, no end to the sequence of integers. Social
revolution
is
only one in the infinite sequence of integers. The law
of revolution is not a social law, it is immeasurably greater, it
is
a
cosmic, universal law-such as the law of the conservation of energy
and the law of the loss of energy (entropy) . Some day an exact
formula will
be
established for the law of revolution. And in this
formula nations, classes, stars-and books will be expressed as
numerical values.
Red, fiery, death-dealing is the law of revolution; but that
death is the birth of a new life, of a new star. And cold, blue as ice,
as the icy interplanetary infinities,
is
the law of entropy. The flame
turns from fiery red to an even, warm pink, no longer death-dealing
but comfort-producing ; the sun ages and becomes a planet suitable
for highways, shops, beds, prostitutes, prisons: that is a law. And in
order to make the planet young again, we must set it afire, we must
thrust it off the smooth highway of evolution: that
is
a law.
The flame, true enough, will grow cold tomorrow or the day
after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis days are years and even
aeons). But already today there should be somebody who can fore–
see that; there should be somebody today to speak heretically of
tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter-tasting) remedy for the
entropy of human thought.
When (in science, religion, social life, art) a flaming, seething
sphere grows cold, the fiery molten rock becomes covered with
dogma-with a hard, ossified, immovable crust. In science, religion,
social life and art, dogmatization is the entropy of thought; what-has
