Beyond the Unexplored Space: The Philosophy & Science-Fiction Works of Olaf Stapledon. Olaf Stapledon
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Beyond the Unexplored Space: The Philosophy & Science-Fiction Works of Olaf Stapledon - Olaf Stapledon страница 110

Название: Beyond the Unexplored Space: The Philosophy & Science-Fiction Works of Olaf Stapledon

Автор: Olaf Stapledon

Издательство: Bookwire

Жанр: Языкознание

Серия:

isbn: 4064066387143

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ unmistakable. Wave-trains of grey, blue, khaki, were seen to advance upon the line from East and West, recoiling in feebler undulation athwart their own advancing successors. They vanished. The tempo of the vision accelerated. Æons rushed headlong into pastness. The minute continents deformed themselves. The little sun shrank, faded to a red spark; and as it did so the little planet became snowy white, a simple chalk-grain, which presently was lost in obscurity. The sun-spark was snuffed out. Paul’s gaze seized upon another sun. This also was snuffed out. One by one, thousand by thousand, all the stars were extinguished, till the whole galaxy had vanished. There was nothing left but darkness. It seemed to Paul that the dark flooded into his mind, wave upon wave. In vain he battled against it. The spirit of night had triumphed. His mind reeled, sickened, sank into unconsciousness. He lay still, with open eyes unseeing. But though he was now profoundly tranced, I, who had worked this change in him, still perceived through all his sense organs. I felt the slight indigestion that had been aggravating his despond. I felt the constriction of his collar, which was rather too small for him. Presently I felt a fly walk across his eyeball. He took no notice. But I, fearing that his trance might break too soon, caused his hand to drive away the intruder, and soothe the irritation. Once more he lay still.

      When at length Paul emerged from this swoon, he found himself recalling with strange distinctness the tarn where long ago he had first watched the intersecting waves. In imagination he watched them now, progressing, interlacing, fading, reappearing in varying patterns on every quarter of the lake. On the actual occasion, they had roused in him little more than intellectual curiosity; but now they had acquired such grave significance that every briefest flurry, every ripple, seemed to imprint its form upon his own being. At first he resisted, though vainly. But soon the insistent rhythms calmed him to acquiescence. He let them mould him, re-form him, as they willed; and in this passivity he found peace. Presently he raised his head, sat up, looked round at the desks, the maps, the grey fields of the windows, his chalky hands, the clumsy writing of some ‘exercises’ awaiting correction. All was as before, yet all was now acceptable, strangely right, even beautiful. Under his breath he whispered ‘God! What a fool I was not to see it long ago!’

      He looked at his watch, gathered up his things, and hurried away. In his step I felt a new buoyancy, in the stream of his thoughts a new and bracing freshness. Soon, no doubt, he would return to his former despair, but the memory of this experience would never wholly desert him.

      At this point I left Paul, and returned to my own world. My first task was to work up the material which I had gathered from Paul and others, and to make it known to my colleagues. Next I took that holiday which was described at the outset of this book. I also participated in the awakening of the Racial Mind. Then at last I came back to Paul, re-discovering him, not precisely at the date where I had left him, but a few days later. The good that I had worked in him seemed already to have disappeared. I found him, as I have already reported, in an agony of indecision, tortured by little incidents in the streets of London.

      It will be necessary to tell how Paul finally tackled his war problem. But for the present we must leave him. My concern with him is incidental to my main theme. He is but an instrument through which I chose to observe your world, and through which I choose to exhibit your world to you. He is also a sample of that world. I have shown the instrument in some detail, and I have displayed the sample; warning you that, though peculiarly significant, it is not an average sample. You have seen that Paul, when he came face to face with the war, was already at grips with certain problems which are in fact the supreme problems of your age. Let me close this chapter by enumerating them. There was the problem of ‘the flesh’ and ‘the spirit’, the problem of human personality and evolving Life, the problem of the divinity of love and the austerity of fate. It was with these problems already troubling consciousness, or stirring in regions deeper than consciousness, that all the more developed members of your species faced the war.

      I now pass on to tell you how your war and your reactions to your war appear to the Last Men.

      CHAPTER V

       ORIGINS OF THE EUROPEAN WAR

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      IN your Homeric saga the human conflict is observed and swayed by invisible but mighty presences. The achievement of each hero is the issue not simply of his own virtue but of the inspiration and machination of some favouring divinity. The gods and goddesses take sides, some with the Greeks, others with the Trojans.

      In the war which I am to describe, the European War, the War to End War, which played so great a part in setting your species toward decline, every turn of events was noted by invisible presences, but these unseen observers were neither divine nor partisan. As on the Trojan plains, so on the plains of Flanders, the hills of Picardy and Champagne and Argonne, Tyrol’s wild heights, the bogs and steppes of Russia, so equally in Arabia, Mesopotamia and Salonika, on the sea and in the upper air, in fact wherever war was present or indirectly felt, there watched invisible and unsuspected presences. These were not gods and goddesses, mentally inferior to the humanity that had created them, interested in men only to use them for their own petty though celestial strife; they were actual human minds. They strove not to give victory to one side or the other; they were concerned only to record and relish the ineluctable course of events, and to kindle in such of you as were open to their influence some glimpse of their own high zest.

      When first we examined your war, it was not uncommon for us to observe in that epoch features which, inexplicable at the time, suggested that some still future influence of our own must be at work upon them, influences which we had not yet, from the Neptunian point of view, been able to exert. Thus, to take the most striking example, in our earliest study we had been perplexed by the fact that the Salonika episode did not develop on the scale that might have been expected. Later in Neptunian time, we discovered that we ourselves were responsible. For it now turned out that certain persons in high military and naval posts were open to our influence. We accordingly swayed them toward inertia, and thus deliberately prevented a sequence of events which would have been far more repugnant to us than those which actually occurred. But such large-scale influence is very seldom possible. Moreover we have become extremely chary of indulging in it; for not infrequently we have come later to regret our meddling.

      In our world, as I have said elsewhere, the mature individual has wholly escaped the snares of private egoism. His will is for the racial good. But his heart may still be torn asunder in respect of conflicts between loyalty to the spirit of man and piety toward the actual issue of fate. Even as individuals, but far more clearly as the race mind, we pass beyond the human loyalty which is the spring of all our action, and see in the form of the cosmos a beauty superior to any human triumph.

      Now although we regard events in your epoch with complete detachment from your many archaic aims, we do feel with you in your racial struggle to become more fully human. When you fail, or when we fail to help you, we grieve. When we take action in your world, we are often torn by doubt as to whether we shall in fact improve or mar the fortune of the race. But in us pity and doubt are tempered by our intuition that in the highest view the whole, although severe, is excellent. Even as individuals, we have this conviction of the superlative beauty of the cosmos. But in the unique racial experience this insight is far more developed, and has a very curious and beatific effect upon us as individuals. For, if our memory is to be trusted, the race mind, when it looks back on the texture of events accomplished in the past, finds each one of them to be a needed feature in the cosmical beauty. In that supreme experience, seemingly, man looks upon the cosmos with a new discerning vision, and would not have any past event to СКАЧАТЬ