This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one h… - Boris Pasternak

"To Be the Famous..."

To be the famous isn’t attractive,
Not this could ever elevate,
You needn’t to make your archive active,
You needn’t your scripts to be all saved.

Self-offering’s aimed by creation,
But ballyhoo or cheap success,
It is a shame, if worthless persons
Are talks of towns’ populace.

But you’ve to live without phony,
To live such life that, after all,
To gain love of the space symphony,
And answer to the future’s call,

And oft to leave gaps in your traces
In fate, but in the papers, crooked,
To mark the chapters and main places
On margins of your being’s book,

To fully sink in the unknown,
And hide in it your own steps
Like hide itself, if mist is grown,
The whole landscape of the place.

The others, by the living traces,
Will pass your way through, bit by bit,
But wins and losses of your battles
You have not to discern on it.

You’ve never – not by fate or folly –
To lose an atom of your face,
But – be alive, alive and only,
Alive and only, till your last.

They really thought what other people sing in songs.

The wood echoed to the hoarse ringing of other saws; somewhere, very far away, a nightingale was trying out its voice, and at longer intervals a blackbird whistled as if blowing dust out of a flute. Even the engine steam rose into the sky warbling like milk boiling up on a nursery alchohol stove.