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

"Yes, but really I was just feeling mortally ashamed."

"Then suddenly you shut the book, gently, and laid it on the table, and said something about this being pretty caddish, really, and
what about stopping it. Then there was an argument, but finally your gang took itself off; and you--it struck me as odd at the time-
stayed behind to help me clear up the mess. Remember? First I tried to push you off with the others, and then when you began to
go, meek as a lamb, I suddenly changed my mind. What a grind it was, wasn't it, fetching the damaged books and furniture from
the quad up the staircase to the top floor."

"Yes, and when we had finished, you offered me cocoa! Cocoa! My God! To me, who considered myself one of the bloods! But I
had the sense to accept, for I was thoroughly awake by then. And it was a damned good drink, too. And we sat there talking till
the small hours, till you nearly fell asleep. Then I borrowed your Bateson's Heredity and took it off to my own room. By
breakfast time I had just about finished it. That first talk we had was an eye-opener to me. Do you remember how we leapt about
from heredity to socialism, religion, astronomy, like a couple of monkeys swinging from branch to branch. Monkeying with the
universe! You had the advantage of far greater knowledge, and I had an absolutely fresh, innocent zest."

"And a diabolical quick-wittedness," I added, "an intelligence that frightened me."

3 - BEGINNINGS OF OUR FRIENDSHIP
From 1908 to 1912




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A Man Divided




AT THIS POINT I shall interrupt my account of my conversation with Victor on his abortive wedding day to tell, mainly in my
own words, about my relations with him at Oxford.

During the rest of the term I saw a good deal of him. We made expeditions on Cumnor Hill. We punted on the Cher. We sat up
late in my room or his, talking about everything under the sun, and far beyond it.

The set with whom Victor normally consorted, the bloods and their hangers-on, found his sudden interest in a colourless nobody
from a secondary school quite inexplicable, and ridiculous. It was assumed that the big fair athlete had conceived a more than
platonic friendship for the small dark bookworm. I myself was as puzzled as anyone by Victor's interest in me, and still more
puzzled by his violent thirst for knowledge. It was all so inconsistent with everything that I had known of him before. On the very
few occasions when our ways had, crossed he had overawed me with that "self- satisfied air of effortless superiority" which was
supposed to be characteristic of our college. And though later I was to learn from the awakened Victor that this imposing
demeanour of his was just a carefully cultivated affectation concealing a bewildered and morally timid self, in those early days it
Impressed me; and at the same time exasperated me against myself for being cowed by an assurance which I vaguely felt to be
meretricious. But on that memorable evening, when we first talked seriously together, Victor's manner suggested an
unselfconscious modesty. In the subsequent weeks of our increasingly close friendship I was often put to shame by the
intellectual humility that accompanied even his most penetrating remarks. I set out to be his mentor in his new-found interests,
but to my chagrin I found that in many ways it was he that was the leader in our mental partnership. Far from being merely the
superficially clever but unoriginal mind that I had supposed him to be, he soared far beyond me in sheer imaginative power; and
this in spite of the fact that at the outset he was ludicrously ignorant of the spheres of knowledge that seemed to me most