Imagination was officially classified as a mental illness.
Day 3 · 목표 ⭐
The discovery that some citizens still possessed imagination led the One State to offer surgery to remove it, framing freedom of thought not as a right but as a pathology requiring cure.
2Reading· 오늘의 본문
We · Yevgeny Zamyatin · 1924
D-503 walked the straight glass avenues of the One State, his shadow a perfect rectangle on the pristine surface. The morning Personal Hour had been spent at his desk, calculating the trajectory of the Integral. The numbers flowed, clean and obedient. Yet, sometimes, a strange sensation prickled behind his eyes. He would look at a curve in his blueprint and see not a mathematical function, but the shape of I-330's smile. He would quickly shake his head, a malfunction to be reported. The city hummed around him, a symphony of regulated motion. Every citizen moved in synchronized lines, their faces calm, identical. His own reflection in a wall of green glass showed the same orderly features. But within, a silent, chaotic seed—imagination—threatened to crack the perfect surface of his world.
B2 · 128 wordsavg 25.6 w/s
D-503's existence within the crystalline order of the One State is a study in prescribed harmony. His daily routine—from the regulated Personal Hours to the synchronized walks—is a physical manifestation of the State's ideology, where individual variance is an aberration. The glass city is not merely an architectural feat but a panoptic metaphor; transparency ensures conformity, and the straight lines of its avenues mirror the desired linearity of thought. However, Zamyatin uses D-503's nascent imagination as the fatal flaw in this geometric utopia. It manifests not as grand rebellion, but as insidious, irrational associations: a mathematical curve evokes a forbidden emotion, a shadow assumes an organic shape. This internal dissonance frames his burgeoning self-awareness not as enlightenment but as a sickness, a pathology that threatens the very calculus of the collective. His world, built on pure reason, begins to fracture under the weight of a single unsanctioned metaphor. What makes We endure as a work of literature is precisely this refusal to offer easy consolation — it demands that readers sit with the discomfort of a world that does not resolve neatly, and find their own position within it.
C1 · 170 wordsavg 34.0 w/s
3Vocabulary· 핵심 어휘 & 연습
citizens
시민들
All citizens of the One State followed the Table of Hours.
possessed
소유하다, 지니다
It was discovered that D-503 possessed a dangerous imagination.
surgery
수술
The One State offered the Great Operation, a surgery to remove imagination.
pathology
병리학, 병리
Freedom of thought was considered a social pathology.
cure
치료하다, 치료법
The State believed the operation was the only cure for imagination.
Activity 1 · 빈칸 채우기5 questions
1. Every hour of D-503's life was carefully ____ by the Table of Hours.
2. The ____ of privacy did not exist in the One State.
3. Individual names were ____ and replaced with numbers.
4. The glass walls guaranteed there was no ____ for citizens.
5. The State was ____ declared to represent perfect happiness.