Alexandr Korol

They are simple, modest, but believe me, they are much happier, wiser, richer — and that’s why you don’t see them. But these, I said, are the next steps, and you cannot see them while you are stuck at your fifth or sixth, because for you, the limit is still nine. And only when you reach nine, when you’ve had your fill of it, of all the entertainments, all these social-material things — only then you settle down, calm down, and start living not for society, not to show off before everyone, but you start to live simply, without vanity, without greed, living for yourself and your family. And then it doesn’t matter — you go out in an ordinary T-shirt walking your dog, and you’re happy, everything is good. You don’t need to show off whose yacht is longer. And in that series they show exactly this — that you get to the very limit, and then you return to where you started from. At least, thank God, I never chased after that. And no matter how much I tried, in the world of society, in the world of people, at least to establish myself as a writer and build some kind of writing career, to somehow try to be a person in the world of people — I still always said: “For me, happiness is a camera, music in headphones, and fishing.” And just imagine, to this day, if someone asked me what I want for happiness right now, I would even say this: that it’s not a house and family, not some kind of success, not a recognized book — no. It’s simply... being in this magical world, where no one bothers you anymore, and you can just sit with a fishing rod, catch fish, and put together playlists of music for different moods. And it doesn’t matter what city, country, or village you are in — it all works. The main thing is this feeling, this state, and the fishing rod. And really, even just being in this state — without a fishing rod — I can simply write, describe, just look around at everything, and from this magical angle, describe everything I see in a diary. And that, too, is happiness for me.

Another vision and feeling I’ve had recently is that it’s as if there is this matrix I was deciphering, a physical one, and in it there are these coordinates, and if I am in the center or in some corner, in some right place of this matrix, then the world around me changes and becomes this magical one, as if I step out of samsara, and the world of people cannot touch me at all. It is as if I am in some kind of vacuum, behind glass.