Free The Monkey Link by Andrei Bitov Page A

multitude; but the multitude is also taken as a unit, in some sense. Then again, the unit is taken as an element of the multitude   …   ”
    We were walking along the shore and not seeing the sea. Yesterday there had been a “box gale”—assorted curiosities were spread out on the shore like wares on an endless display table. We walked along this market row. Wooden boxes were less common than bright plastic. We might find a keg or a pail, also lightweight and colorful. If we were lucky, it might even be undamaged, washed from the decks without reason. Here and there lay plastic balls—fishing-net floats, beautiful. The balls had survived intact, but we did not know what to do with their definitive form and lost purpose. We walked along, developing an idea, and suddenly a certain want of attention crept into the idea: there was something red or blue up ahead, attracting us. Studiously we avoided quickening our step. The idea rigidified, narrowed, and seemed to find its natural conclusion: this was half of a scarlet plastic pail, a vertical section. The intact side of the pail had been turned to us out of spite. We passed by this fraud—and a fresh idea gathered fresh force. A fresh apparition of a fresh item, up ahead, delineated the next pause or an unexpected turn of the subject   …
    “Haven’t you ever thought about the nature of man’s craving to gather things? Mushrooms, berries, birds’ eggs, collections? Or the gifts of the sea?” the doctor said, kicking a yellow float. It rolled back down into the rising tide. The surf was listless after the gale. “To understand what we inherited from our ancestor, we need to know what our ancestor was like. Morphologically, man isn’t very specialized for procuring a particular food. His original ecological niche was the gathering of fruit, herbs, roots, eggs, small animals, and coastal flotsam. Such a method of subsistence is inefficient and requires vigorous, varied activity. In contrast to many other species (herbivores, for example), man possessed limited food resources. Hunger was a permanent state   …   ”
    Thus he resisted when I tormented him about man, but then lightly spilled his secrets himself. Even though he was full of a noble determination not to exploit his experience as an ecologist and ethologist by applying it to man, still, he himself was a man, and he couldn’t help thinking about the same things I did. Thus, without meaning to, he had already told me enough. In some respects his ideas were so convincing to me, I believed them so easily, that this very ease struck me as the best of proofs. With a dilettante’s enthusiasm, I was already using as my own many of the concepts he had taught me. Our conversation would follow this pattern: “You’re saying”—I would seize on a remark of his— “that   …Doesn’t it follow that   …? Then don’t we have to conclude   …?”
    “Yes, I suppose you could say that,” the doctor would agree reluctantly.
    “Then,” I would say, “we can hypothesize   …   ”
    “Yes, that, too,” he would agree stolidly.
    “It turns out that man   …   ” I would say, heading into the homestretch.
    “No,” the doctor would say, and easily rebut me, with arguments to spare.
    I would retreat temporarily, nodding.
    But by now he was used to the freedom of our conversations. Little by little I had corrupted him. His imperative was weakening. I don’t think this was because I was persuasive; all these ideas had been languishing within him for a long time, unusable. At first he spoke only of primitive man. In this connection, he might let slip such definitive sentences as: “Man has a low fertility rate compared to other animals.”
    Or: “Flourishing species strive to increase their numbers and territory as much as possible. Man is a flourishing species; his urge to settle in new places and increase his numbers is natural. By the beginning of our era, the number of people on earth is