The View from the Window
"There's no need to read the newspapers or watch the television to understand that a psychic storm of immeasurable violence is raging in the skies over Russia. You only have to close your eyes to be struck in the face by an invisible wave of other people's terror and despair, and while the shots are still rattling away outside, there's time to wonder what brings this exaggerated and irrational terror into our lives. It's obviously not just the uncertainty about tomorrow and yesterday. Animals don't know what they're going to eat tomorrow, but still for millions of years they've carried on walking and flying and swimming about. Even miles down under the sea, in the eternal darkness, there are half-blind fish resisting the pressure of thousands of tons of water on every side. They're not squashed flat as a pancake for the simple reason that their internal pressure is equal to the external pressure. But if one of these fish is pulled from the depths up to the surface, it will explode like a bomb.
"We are the same kind of fish. For seventy years we have lived under the pressure of tons of terror, which has permeated everything around us so thoroughly that we have ceased to notice it. It has become an integral part of ourselves, and now that they have tried to drag us up to the surface in a few short years, up to freedom and the sun, we feel terror advancing on us out of the future. But there is no terror in the future--what we are feeling now comes from inside us. We are being torn apart by terror that used to be balanced by the inhuman pressure applied to our souls. They keep on pulling us up higher and higher, and we've already swollen perceptibly, but if only we don't burst in the next few meters, at long last we shall finally glimpse the sun."
--excerpt from "The View from the Window", by Russian writer Victor Pelevin
"We are the same kind of fish. For seventy years we have lived under the pressure of tons of terror, which has permeated everything around us so thoroughly that we have ceased to notice it. It has become an integral part of ourselves, and now that they have tried to drag us up to the surface in a few short years, up to freedom and the sun, we feel terror advancing on us out of the future. But there is no terror in the future--what we are feeling now comes from inside us. We are being torn apart by terror that used to be balanced by the inhuman pressure applied to our souls. They keep on pulling us up higher and higher, and we've already swollen perceptibly, but if only we don't burst in the next few meters, at long last we shall finally glimpse the sun."
--excerpt from "The View from the Window", by Russian writer Victor Pelevin