"Asimov, Isaac - Of Time & Space & Other Things" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

"An' forward tho' I canna see,
"I guess an' fear!"

Somewhere, then, in the progress of evolution from
mouse to man, a primitive hominid first caught and grasped
at the notion that someday he would die. Every living crea-
ture died at last, our proto-philosopher could not help but
notice, and the great realization somehow dawned upon
him that he himself would do so, too. If death must come
to all life, it must come to himself as well, and ahead of
him he saw world's end.
We talk often about the discovery of fire, which marked
man off from all the rest of creation. Yet the discovery of
death', is surely just as unique and may have been just as
driving a force in man's upward climb.
The details of both discoveries are lost forever in the
shrouded and impenetrable fog of pre-history, but they
appear in myths. The discovery of fire is celebrated most
famously in the Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole fire
from the Sun for the poor, shivering race of man.
And the discovery of death is celebrated most famously
in the Hebrew myth of the Garden of Eden, where man
first dwelt in the immortality that came of the ignorance
of time. But man gained knowledge, or, if you prefer, he
ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
And with knowledge, death entered the world, in the
sense that man knew he must die. In biblical terms, this
awareness of death is described as resulting from divine
revelation. In the 'solemn speech in which He apprises
Adam of the punishment for disobedience, God tells him
(Gen. 3:19): for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt
thou return."
But man struggles onward under the terrible weight of
Adam's curse, and I cannot help but wonder how much
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of man's accomplishment traces directly back to his en-
deavor to neutralize the horrifying awareness of inevitable
death. He may transfer the consciousness of existence from
himself to his family and find immortali ,ty after all in the
fact that though his own spark of life snuffs out, an allied
spark continues in the children that issued out of his body.
How much of tribal society is based on this?
Or he may decide that the true life is not of the body
which is, indeed, mortal and must suffer death; but of the
spirit which lives forever. And how much of philosophy
and religion and the highest aspirations of man's faculties
arises from this striving to deny Adam's curse?
Yet what of a society in which the notion of family and