Friday, May 15, 2009

A funny conversation from C&P (Are some progressives fools?)

[Lebeziatnikov:]
We had a debate lately on the question: Has a member of the community the right to enter another member’s room, whether man or woman, at any time … and we decided that he has!

[Luzhin]‘It might be at an inconvenient moment, he-he!’
Lebeziatnikov was really angry.
‘You are always thinking of something unpleasant,’ he cried with aversion. ‘Tfoo! How vexed I am that when I was expounding our system, I referred prematurely to the question of personal privacy! It’s always a stumbling-block to people like you, they turn it into ridicule before they understand it. And how proud they are of it, too! Tfoo! I’ve often maintained that that question should not be approached by a novice till he has a firm faith in the system.

.....

‘Because I don’t want in your free marriage to be made a fool of and to bring up another man’s children, that’s why I want legal marriage,’ Luzhin replied in order to make some answer.
He seemed preoccupied by something.

‘Children? You referred to children,’ Lebeziatnikov started off like a warhorse at the trumpet call. ‘Children are a social question and a question of first importance, I agree; but the question of children has another solution. Some refuse to have children altogether, because they suggest the institution of the family. We’ll speak of children later, but now as to the question of honour, I confess that’s my weak point. That horrid, military, Pushkin expression is unthinkable in the dictionary of the future. What does it mean indeed? It’s nonsense, there will be no deception in a free marriage! That is only the natural consequence of a legal marriage, so to say, its corrective, a protest. So that indeed it’s not humiliating … and if I ever, to suppose an absurdity, were to be legally married, I should be positively glad of it. I should say to my wife: ‘My dear, hitherto I have loved you, now I respect you, for you’ve shown you can protest!’ You laugh! That’s because you are of incapable of getting away from prejudices. Confound it all! I understand now where the unpleasantness is of being deceived in a legal marriage, but it’s simply a despicable consequence of a despicable position in which both are humiliated. When the deception is open, as in a free marriage, then it does not exist, it’s unthinkable. Your wife will only prove how she respects you by considering you incapable of opposing her happiness and avenging yourself on her for her new husband. Damn it all! I sometimes dream if I were to be married, pfoo! I mean if I were to marry, legally or not, it’s just the same, I should present my wife with a lover if she had not found one for herself. ‘My dear,’ I should say, ‘I love you, but even more than that I desire you to respect me. See!’ Am I not right?’

No comments: