"Stanislaw Lem - Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

could not shut themselves up in ivory towers and take the time to develop new techniques of
transcription.
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Desperate measures were employed. Certain branches of the amusement industry (such asfeelms
) mobilized their entire production to record incoming information on the positions of spaceships and
satellites, for collisions were multiplying rapidly. Circuit diagrams were printed, from memory, on fabrics.
All available plastic writing materials were distributed among the schools. Physics professors personally
had to tend atomic piles. Emergency teams of scientists flitted from one point of the globe to another. But
these were merely tiny particles of order, atoms of organization that quickly dissolved in an ocean of
spreading chaos. Shaken as it was by endless upheavals, engaged in a constant struggle against the tide
of superstition, illiteracy and ignorance, the stagnant culture of the Chaotic should be judged not by what
it lost of the heritage of centuries, but by what it was able to salvage, against all odds.

To check the first fury of the Great Collapse necessitated tremendous sacrifices. Earth's first
footholds on Mars had been saved, and technology, that backbone of all civilization, was reconstructed.
Microphones and tape banks replaced the storage centers of demolished papyr. Unfortunately, cruel
losses were sustained in other areas.

Because the supply of new writing materials failed to meet even the most urgent needs, anything
that did not directly serve to save the bare framework of society had to be jettisoned. The humanities
suffered the worst. Knowledge was disseminated orally, through lectures; the audiences became the
educators of the next generation. This was one of those astonishing primitivisms of Chaotic civilization
that rescued Earth from total disaster, though losses in the areas of history, historiography, paleology and
paleoesthetics were quite irreparable. Only the smallest fragment of a rich literary legacy was preserved.
Millions of volumes of chronicles, priceless relics of the Middle and Late Neogene, turned to dust
forever.

At the end of the Chaotic we find a most paradoxical situation: there was a relatively high level of
technology, including the active initiation of gravitronics and technobiotics, not to mention the success of
cisgalactic mass transport; yet the human race knew next to nothing of its own past. All that survives
today of the enormous achievements of the Neogene are a few scattered and unrelated remnants, factual
accounts altered beyond all recognition and thoroughly garbled through countless retellings in the oral
tradition. Even the most important events are of doubtful chronology.

One must concur with Subgnostor Nappro Leis when he says that papyralysis meant
historioparalysis. Only in this perspective can we assess the true value of the work of Prognostor
Wid-Wiss who, in his single-handed battle against official historiography, discovered the "Notes from the
Neogene," a voice speaking to us across the abyss of centuries, a voice belonging to one of the last
inhabitants of the lost land of Ammer-Ka. This monument is all the more precious in that there are no
others to rival it in importance; it cannot be compared, for example, with the papyrantic finds made by
the archeological expedition of Syrtic Paleognostor Bradrah the Mnemonite at the Marglo shale diggings
in the Lower Preneogene. Those finds concern religious beliefs prevalent during the Eighth Dynasty of
Ammer-Ka; they speak of various Perils -- Black, Red, Yellow -- evidently cabalistic incantations
connected in some way with the mysterious deity Rayss, to whom burnt offerings were apparently made.
But this interpretation is still being debated by the Trans-Sindental and Greater Syrtic Schools, as well as
by a group of disciples of the famous Bog-Wood.