"Olaf Stapledon - A Man Divided" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

did to her, breaking off the match, was just the pain of a necessary operation. It had to be. (But, oh, I hope she gets through with it
quickly.) What he did was to keep on for months poisoning her with his insincerity and false values. Yes! The memory of last
night's 'goodnight' makes me go hot all over. Then, I (if I must say 'I' and not 'he') thought of myself as the romantic lover,
worshipping the beloved as a being of superior calibre, almost divine; and ready to live for her all the rest of my life. But looking
back, I see precisely what was happening in my mind, and it's not at all edifying. Of course there was plenty of good healthy
physical lust for Edith's extremely seductive body; but it was presented to the somnambulist not as lust at all but as the physical
consequence of my adoration of her pure spirit. Now, it makes me squirm. And what sort of a pure Spirit has she, poor girl? No
doubt, deep down inside her there's a little smothered germ of honesty and generosity, the true and pure Edith. But it hardly ever
manages to express itself, because of the loads of false conventions and false values overlying it. And while I was protesting my
selfless devotion to her as a person, what I was actually thinking (though I didn't notice it) was that she was an excellent match
for me, well trained in all the antics of our sort of people, perhaps rather 'better class' than myself, thoroughly presentable,
something to show off with complacency. But far from worshipping her, I felt that I was definitely better stuff in away, and that
she was really only raw material for me to work up into a first-class partner. Sometimes, for instance, she had shown a tendency
to think for herself. That sort of thing mustn't be allowed. Her function was to be the adoring and helpful wife."

He paused, then concluded, "So you see my wide-awake self does very clearly remember the experiences of the other. If it didn't
it wouldn't have any background at all. It would be merely an infant mind. The actual sum of its existence has been far shorter
than the other's."

"Do you mean it's never active for more than a few minutes or hours?"

"Sometimes days, even weeks; and it's spells grow longer as I grow older. For the present, at any rate. But I can't help fearing that
the general stiffening thatt sets in in middle age will reverse the process. Now let me get back to my story. My first really
important spell of wide-awake living was brought on by you, in our third year at Oxford, when we first got to know each other."

"Now," I interrupted, "I understand why you were so inconsequent; first stand-offish, then friendly, then cold again."

"It began," he said, "after that bump supper, when some of us, all a bit tight, invaded your room. Instead of taking it lying down,
you had the cheek to make a fuss, so we began chucking things out of the window into the quad. You actually put up a fight,




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which was surprising and amusing, because we had always regarded you as a worm. You had come from some bloody little
unheard-of grammar school, and you had an accent like the mud on a provincial street. We weren't going to stand cheek from that
sort. No doubt you remember, when you were being I held down, I stared at you as offensively as I could, and said you reminded
me of my hosier. It was then that I came awake. It was your pinched little face that did it. Instead of seeing you as just a type, and
a despised type, I suddenly saw you, as I had seen Johnson minor. Somehow I saw you being torn between contempt for us all
and irrational envy and self-abasement. And I saw how horribly hurt you were, not simply by our brutality but by your own
involuntary treason to yourself."

Interrupting Victor, I said, "I can distinctly remember how your face suddenly changed. Your eyes opened wide with surprise,
and your mouth too. Then you turned away with an odd, awkward little laugh. You picked up a book, and sat on the arm of the
easy chair, apparently reading."