Yevgeny Zamyatin — We [9]

This must be similar to what a woman feels when she first senses within herself the pulse of a new, still tiny, still blind little human being. It is I, and at the same time, not I. And for many long months it will be necessary to nourish it with my own life, my own blood, then tear it painfully from myself and lay it at the feet of the One State. — Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 9

Note

The narrator reclaims the visceral, organic imagery of biological creation—pregnancy, blood, birth—and converts it entirely into an act of civic surrender.