Romain Gary. European education (№ 404421)

Lieutenant Tvardovsky takes a small volume out of his pocket and puts it on the ground, on the ant path. But this will not force the ants to deviate from their everlasting path. They climb the barrier and indifferently, hastily crawl over the bitter words printed on paper in big black letters: "EUROPEAN EDUCATION." They stubbornly drag their funny blades of grass. The book will not cause them to stray from the Path that millions of other ants have followed before them and which millions of others have blazed. How many millennia have they been working for and how many millennia have this ridiculous, tragic and indefatigable tribe still to labor? How many new cathedrals will they erect for their God, who rewarded them with such a fragile constitution and such a heavy burden? Why fight and pray, hope and believe? The world in which people suffer and die is no different from the world in which ants suffer and die: it is a cruel and incomprehensible world, where the main thing is to carry further and further an absurd blade of grass or straw, further and further, in the sweat of your brow and at the cost of his bloody tears, on and on! without even stopping to take a breath and ask why ...