>>510937927‘But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then,
one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of
things on earth?’
‘Man governs it himself,’ Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this
admittedly none-too-clear question. ‘Pardon me,’ the stranger responded
gently, ‘but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan
for certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you,
then, how man can govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity
of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period - well, say, a
thousand years - but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?
‘And in fact,’ here the stranger turned to Berlioz, ‘imagine that you, for
instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally,
so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get ...hem... hem ...
lung cancer...’ - here the foreigner smiled sweetly, and if the thought of
lung cancer gave him pleasure - ‘yes, cancer’ - narrowing his eyes like a
cat, he repeated the sonorous word - ‘and so your governing is over!
‘You are no longer interested in anyone’s fate but your own. Your
family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to
learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well.
Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you
understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought
he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a
wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there
is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven.
