"Harlan Ellison - Paingod & Other Delusions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

“Much more. Because now I understand. It is a gray and a lonely place in which we live, all of us, swinging
between desperation and emptiness, and all that makes it worthwhile is caring, is beauty. But if there were no opposite
for beauty, or for pleasure, it would all turn to dust.”
Being. Now you know who you are.
“I am most blessed of the Ethos, and most humble. You have given me the highest, kindest position in the
universes. For I am the God to all men, and to all creatures small and large, whether they call me by name or not. I am
Paingod, and it is my life, however long it stretches, to treat them to the finest they will ever know. To give them pain,
that they may know pleasure. Thank you.”
And the Ethos went away, secure that at last, after all the eons of Paingods who had broken under the strain,
who had lacked the courage to take that nightwalk, they had found one who would last truly forever. Trente had come
of age.
While back in the cubicle, hanging star-bright and translucent in space, high above it all, yet very much part
of it all, the creature who would never die, the creature who had lived within the rotting body of Pieter Koslek and for a
few moments in the soul and talent of Colin Marshack, that creature called Paingod, learned one more thing, as he
stared at the tiny model of the planet Earth he had known.
Trente knew the feel of a tear formed in a duct and turned free from an eye globe-cool on his face.
Trente knew happiness.
Now it can he told: my secret vice. Buried deep in the anthracite core of my being is a personal trait so hideous, so
confounding, a conceit so terrible in its repercussions, that it makes sodomy, pederasty and barratry on the high
seas seem as tame as a Frances Parkinson Keyes novel. I am always late. Invariably. Consistently. If I tell you I’ll be
there to pick up you at 8:30, expect me Thursday. A positive genius for tardiness. Paramount sends a car to pick me
up when I’m scripting, otherwise they know I’ll be off looking, at the flowers, or watching, the ocean, or reading, a
copy of The Amazing Spider-Man in the bathroom. I have been brought to task for this, on innumerable occasions. It
prompted several courts-martial when I was in the Army. I’ve lost girl friends because of it. So I went to a doctor, to
see if there was something, wrong with my medulla oblongata, or somesuch. He told me I was always late. His bill
was seventy-five dollars. I’ve decided that unlike most other folk with highly developed senses of the fluidity of time,
the permanence of humanity in the chronostream, et al, I got no ticktock going up there on top. So I had to explain
it to the world, to cop out, as it were, in advance. I wrote the following story as my plea for understanding,
extrapolating the (to me) ghastly state of the world around me-in which everyone scampers here and there to be
places on time-to a time not too far away (by my watch) in which you get your life docked every time you’re late. It is
not entirely coincidental that the name of the hero in this minor masterpiece closely resembles that of the author, to
wit:

“Repent, Harlequin!”
Said the Ticktockman
THERE ARE ALWAYS THOSE WHO ASK, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points
sharply made, who need to know “where it’s at,” this:

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army,
and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of
the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be
manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They
have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others-as
most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders-serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely
make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes,
patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist
it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Civil Disobedience