We Always Pay Dearly For Chasing After

Every Act Of Perception Has An Emotional Coloring.

There Are A Lot Of Clear Thinkers Everywhere.

There Is No Point Asserting And Reasserting What The Heart Cannot Believe.

In The Camp, This Meant Committing My Verse-many Thousands Of Lines-to Memory. To Help Me With This I Improvised Decimal Counting Beads And, In Transit Prisons, Broke Up Matchsticks And Used The Fragments As Tallies. As I Approached The End Of My Sentences I Grew More Confident Of My Powers Of Memory, And Began Writing Down And Memorizing Prose-dialogue At First, But Then, Bit By Bit, Whole Densely Written Passages. My Memory Found Room For Them! It Worked. But More And More Of My Time-in The End As Much As One Week Every Month-went Into The Regular Repetition Of All I Had Memorized.

If We Could All Take A Sober Look At Our History, Then We Would No Longer See This Nostalgic Attitude To The Soviet Past That Predominates Among The Less Affected Part Of Our Society.