Yevgeny Zamyatin — We [538]

It was the same unknown and eerie jungle as that other one, behind the Green Wall, inhabited by the extraordinary, incomprehensible creatures that spoke without words. It seemed to me that I was seeing through thick glass something infinitely huge and at the same time infinitely small, scorpionlike, with a hidden yet constantly sensed sting—the V-1… But perhaps this was nothing else but my “soul,” which, like the legendary scorpion of the ancients, voluntarily stung itself with everything that… — Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 538

Note

The fusion of mathematics, internal terror, and wild nature creates an uncanny, precise vision of the psychological ‘soul’ as an intrusive, living organism.