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Title: Astonishing Creatures Author: Leo Tolstoy Date: 1880 Language: en Topics: fiction Source: Original text from http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=10326, 2021. Translated by EarthlyFireFlies (WikiSource.org user).
There are such creatures who all live off the land, but in order for
them to become harder as possible to feed, they divided their land so
that only those who are not working on it can use it, but those who
work, they cannot use it and suffer and die generations after
generations from the inability to feed off the land. Besides, these
creatures elect one family or several families out of many and renounce
their will and reason for the sake of slavish obedience to everything
that the elect ones will want to do to them. And the elect ones happen
to be the most evil and stupid of all. But the creatures who elect and
submit, praise them in every way. These creatures speak different
languages, unintelligible to each other. But instead of trying to
eliminate the cause of misunderstanding and discord, they separate
themselves even further, in addition to language differences, they
divide into different coalitions, called states, and because of these
coalitions they kill thousands and thousands of creatures alike
themselves, and ravage one another. For more convenient ravaging and
killing of each other, these creatures put on identical, special,
primarily colorful clothing, invent means of killing of each other and
teach the obedient multitude the best ways of killing.
With all of that, these creatures, to explain their meaning of life and
its purpose, assure themselves and each other, that there is a creature
alike them the but only possessing those properties that they would like
to have, which therefore is able to do all sorts of follies and nasty
things; and they come up with various, uttermost useless to anyone means
of pleasing this imaginary creature, and in this pleasing they spend
huge share the fruits of their labor, although these fruits are
predominantly not enough to feed even themselves. To make sure that this
fib has not ceased to deceive children, parents diligently teach their
children all the lies about this being, called God, and about how he
created the world, how he became a human, how then he gave people his
body and then flew onto sky, about what they know that it’s untrue, and
so on. And not only they require from their children to repeat all of
that, but they require the same from other people, and killed and
continue to kill hundreds of thousands alike for disagreeing with that.
But it’s not enough that they all do all these mean and stupid things,
and suffer from them, and know that they suffer precisely from these
nasty things and follies, but they not only continue doing them, but
they also elect from themselves people who are assigned to come up with
such rationale, according to which all the nonsense and dirty tricks are
necessary to do, can’t not to be done. All these arguments, the most
convoluted and confusing to everyone, the least to those who invent
them, they call science. And all these justifications for nastiness and
stupidity and various, good for nothing, philosophizing are regarded as
the most important work, and these theorizing are taught to all
children, and all parents and youths themselves consider for the great
honor to learn this science.
These creatures get divorced in such a dirty, ugly way that they
themselves are ashamed of this incident and not only do not commit it in
front of others, but always secretly. Moreover, they commit acts,
consequences which — the birth of new such creatures — are not only
painful for those creatures, from womb of whose new, helpless in their
early lives, creatures come out, but also these new creatures make lives
of those who produce them highly difficult, and become burden to them.
In addition, the incessant reproduction of these creatures threatens
them with disasters of hunger for all, because their multiplying is
happening faster than the production of food for all. These creatures
know it and speak about it and, despite of this, are not only acting
contrary to their benefits, health, general considerations, but,
whenever possible, they not only acclaim but sanctify this disgusting
act. Some praise it in disjointed, confusing words, called poetry,
others not only praise, but bless this detestable act in the name of
that fictional creature they call god.
I will not speak about those millions of non-senses and nasty things
committed by these beings: how they poison themselves with toxins,
considering it pleasure; how they gather in the most contaminated by
themselves places in large numbers, whereas huge spaces of unoccupied
land are available, build the buildings of 30 floors in single area; or
as not caring about how to better move around for all of them, take care
only about how only some of them could ride, fly as soon as possible; or
how they put words together is a way so that their endings would be the
same, and after putting them together, how they admire this set of
words, calling it poetry; or how they collect other words without
endings, also stupid and weird words, call them laws and because of
these words they, in every way, torment, lock in prisons and kill each
other, guided by these laws. Can’t even recount everything.
The most remarkable of all is that these creatures not only don’t wise
up, use their reasoning not to understand what is stupid and bad, but on
the contrary, to justify all their own stupidity and nastiness. And not
only they do not want to see that these nonsense and nasty things are
tormenting them, they don’t let anyone among themselves indicate, that
don’t need to do what they do, and that it’s possible and must do
something entirely different and not to suffer as much. As soon as a
creature appears among them, who uses his mind, immediately all the rest
come in anger, indignation, horror and in any way possible scold, beat
such a creature or hang him up on the gallows or on the cross, or burn,
or shoot. And, what is stranger than all, is that when they hang, kill
this reasonable, among the mad, creature, and it no longer bothers them,
they begin to slowly forget what this reasonable creature was talking
about, and they start to make up something as if it said, which it never
said, and when everything was told by this reasonable being becomes
thoroughly forgotten and distorted, that same creatures, who earlier
hated and tortured this, one of all, reasonable creature, begin to
glorify the crucified and killed, sometimes even thinking of doing this
creature a great honor, recognize him as being equal to that imaginary
evil and grotesque god whom they revere.
These creatures are astonishing. These creatures are called people.