I'm paraphrasing, but she uses the example of infinity to illustrate the concept in terms he can understand - no final number, and therefore no final revolution. Basically, this conversation posited that revolutions never end there's never the 'last revolution' because a perfect society can never exist. My favorite part of the book was the little callback to a conversation on the cyclic nature of revolutions (I think between D and I). He is ultimately a weak and naive narrator, with incomplete information and blinded by his romantic feelings toward I-330.

He does eventually realize he was only being used for his access to the rocket, and at that point he succumbs to the pull of conformity, admitting his violations against the state. He was ultimately a small cog in the machination of a revolution he didn't understand or plan. Somewhere midday through the book, I started to question whether he was a reliable narrator. The narrator is an engineer, so even when he begins deviating from the strict confines of his orderly society, his 'whimsical' daydreams still remain mostly comparisons to math or science or engineering. 'An invisible aero carries me up to the azure heights of my favorite abstractions.'

'You can so clearly hear the metallic plinks of your thoughts.'

'Delineated by stately and stern quadrilinear contours' A few phrases and lines that I jotted down. Preserving imagery, metaphors, and wordplay are extremely difficult when moving between languages, and it was masterful in WE. Outside of any other commentary on the original work, the translation is beautifully done. **I was given a copy of this book by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. It's all a bit familiar for veterans of the genre but the influence of Zamyatin's book cannot be understated. One citizen, D-503, meets a free-thinking rebel who both repels and fascinates him and causes him to begin questioning his own place within the One State. In a 'perfect' society surrounded by a Green Wall which keeps out untamed wilderness, the omnipotent One State controls the actions and thoughts of its citizens, who are known only by numbers and live in literal glass houses to be better observed for 'unnatural' actions. I've always considered 1984 and Brave New World to be standard bearers in the dystopian genre so consider my surprise when it turns out both of those classic novels have taken inspiration and at times direct plot points from Yevgeny Zamyatin's book. A timely retranslation of the Dystopian novel that influenced them all for an audience (including myself) that may have been previously unaware of the impact it had.

We yevgeny zamyatin best translation