Alexandr Korol

The same with queues: if the queues are super-long and you have to wait 3 or 5 hours, then I’d just — back then I was young, I loved to write chapters. I would write outright: “You can’t imagine what kind of power I have — that even if they locked me up somewhere for a week, it would be nothing for me, because I would arrange it so that all of it would feel like a minute.” That is — I wouldn’t feel the week. But that was something I declared back then; right now I don’t know how. All of that was back then. And back then I would describe how, likewise, you could sit in a queue at the polyclinic for 2 hours, but by sensation you’d arrange it so that all of it had felt like a minute. And you don’t even get tired from this, and you don’t sink into evaluating time, because you are maximally “without the mind.” And the more, on the contrary, the mind is switched on, the harder and longer it is for you to sit in this queue, and the more you go out of your mind from it. That is also unusual. Not going out of your mind — I mean the word in a different sense: it irritates you, like people, from their own mind. The temperature of the air — that is, my attention was so much somewhere else, that I could not understand whether it was super-hot in the room or super-cold. That is — only a person could be a reference point for me in this respect, or through that person I might begin to feel this at all. What is his reaction: if someone came to me as a guest, and if he found my house cold, then I might start to feel cold — but only from the fact that this person had appeared in my house, and through him I begin to feel it. But if I am alone at home, without a person, I am not cold. And likewise not hot. And if a person comes for whom the temperature in the house seems hot, and he starts to feel it, and if he is with me — I start to feel that it is hot and stuffy here too. But it is him that I am feeling. Without people, there is neither cold nor heat — none of this do I feel. That is what was unusual when I was young. That is — it doesn’t matter what the temperature of the air is, when you are in this state.

So then — the attachment of people. So it turns out — I would meet with a person, and back then I was still young, after all — had finished school, had institute. And I also worked in many places. And so I’d meet with a person — it doesn’t matter whether it was a boy or a girl — that is, what I’m getting at is that this isn’t connected with any kind of sympathy and so on, I don’t care at all. The point is different: when I would meet with a person, on the first day of contact, it was as if the person was in my world — in this childlike world, “without the mind.”