August 3, 2024

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Entries 1-4)

Reading progress log and notes on the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Initial Observations

In the first three entries which I have read so far, D-503’s thoughts are frequently cut off by a bell (Table of Hours), for example, for bedtime.

Really threw me off a lot that people are referred to as numbers, especially when the narrator talks about math as well.

People from the past (before the One State) are called the ancients and savages.

Entry Four

• The recently invented musicometer eerily resembles today’s AI
  • “Simply by turning this handle, any of you can produce up to three sonatas an hour. Yet think how much effort this had cost your forebears! They were able to create only by whipping themselves up to fits of ‘inspiration’—an uknown form of epilepsy” (page 13/195)

Reading We feels like looking back in time, but at ourselves today (even though Zamyatin refer to 20th-century society). It is a strangely second-person perspective. Unsettling, but it allows you to appreciate what we have today.

Favorite Quotes

• “But, to begin with, I am incapable of jokes, for every joke contains a lie as an implicit function. Secondly, our One State Science asserts that this was how the ancients lived, and our State Science never errs.” (page 11/195)
• “At this point (I repeat, I write these notes without concealing anything)—at this point I became as though impermeable to the vitalizing stream that flowed from the loud-speakers. I was suddenly overcome by the feeling that I had come there for nothing (why “for nothing,” and how could I not have come, since I had been assigned there?). Everything seemed empty to me, nothing but mere husks.” (page 13/195)

Vocabulary

• predilection: a bias in favor of something
• dint: an impression or a hollow in a surface

Relabeled Items

• “royal” box: piano

“Currently Reading” Widget

I heard about Literal.club, a Goodreads alternative, which provides a widget that I could incorporate into my blog. Goodreads no longer gives out API keys, so this wouldn’t be possible on Goodreads without some hacking (not the cybersecurity, web exploitation kind).

Because the widget requires custom attributes on a div element, using it in Astro or any framework with TypeScript enabled will show errors. I fixed this by reading the Astro TypeScript docs on type utilities and adding:

src/custom-attributes.d.ts

declare namespace astroHTML.JSX {
  interface HTMLAttributes {
    handle?: string;
    status?: string;
    layout?: string;
  }
}