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Generally, my whole life consisted of embarrassment. I have never managed to understand what human life is. I was born in a village in the north-east of the country. I saw a train for the first time in my life when I was an adult. I considered railway overpasses to be an amusement built in a foreign style at some ingenious whim; although I used them a lot of times I still couldn't get used to the idea that their purpose was just for a safe crossing over the railway tracks. On more than one occasion, when I was going up or down the overpass, I felt as if I was on a fancy amusement. I considered it to be the most pleasant service delivered by the railway and when later I realised that the overpass was just a bridge over tracks, in other words, a construction of very practical use, I stopped being interested in them.
I remember once when I was a child, I saw a metro in a book, and also for a long time I considered it to be not a transport created for practical use, but an exciting amusement. How fabulous is that to have a ride on a train underground!
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Of course, nobody enjoys being told off, or to be the reason for somebody's anger. But in a deformed-by-crossness human face, I see a real animal heart, and this animal-human seems to me, worse tempered than a lion, a crocodile or a dragon. Usually, people tend to hide their animal temper very deeply, but sometimes it shows itself, like a napping cow that browses lazily, and then suddenly hits a gadfly on a barrel with its tail. I shake whenever I see a man's awaken animal; the hair stands up like a mountain. Is anger an inevitable fellow traveller of a man in his life’s journey? This thought always made me feel helpless.
People always plunged me into horror. I even believed that I hadn't succeeded as a man, and as a result, I hid my torment in my heart of hearts.I tried hard to mask the melancholy and nervousness by wrapping myself in naive optimism and becoming an even bigger buffoon.
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