The Gulag Archipelago, ch. 1

[packbat]

Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."

If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?

But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"

And this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.

— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, p. 3-4

This is a truly intense book. I saw a quote from it somewhere, then saw it at the comic book shop and picked it up. It speaks with a despair I have never seen since I read John le Carré's The Spy who Came in From the Cold. But this one's not fiction.

I've only read the first chapter, twenty-one pages out of six hundred twelve.