"Olaf Stapledon - Last Men in London" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

my mouthpiece serves me adequately, shall be kindled with a sense of that beauty which, in spite of all your follies and treasons,
is yours uniquely. For though the whole career of your species is so confused and barren, and though, against the background of
the rise and fall of species after species and the destruction of world after world, the life of any individual among you, even the
most glorious, seems so completely ineffective and insignificant, yet, in the least member of your or any other species, there lies
for the discerning eye a beauty peculiar not only to that one species but to that one individual.

To us the human dawn is precious for its own sake. And it is as creatures of the dawn that we regard you, even in your highest
achievement. To us the early human natures and every primitive human individual have a beauty which we ourselves, in spite of
all our triumphs, have not; the beauty namely of life's first bewildered venturing upon the wings of the spirit, the beauty of the
child with all its innocent brutishness and cruelty. We understand the past better than it can understand itself, and love it better
than it can love itself. Seeing it in relation to all things, we see it as it is; and so we can observe even its follies and treasons with
reverence, knowing that we ourselves would have behaved so, had we been so placed and so fashioned. The achievements of the
past, however precarious and evanescent, we salute with respect, knowing well that to achieve anything at all in such
circumstances and with such a nature entailed a faith and fortitude which in those days were miracles. We are therefore moved by
filial piety to observe all the past races of men, and if possible every single individual life, with careful precision, so that, before
we are destroyed, we may crown those races our equals in glory though not in achievement. Thus we shall contribute to the




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Last Men in London




cosmos a beauty which it would otherwise lack, namely the critical yet admiring love which we bear toward you.

But it is not only as observers that we, who are of man's evening, are concerned with you, children of the dawn. In my earlier
message I told how the future might actually influence the past, how beings such as my contemporaries, who have in some degree
the freedom of eternity, may from their footing in eternity, reach into past minds and contribute to their experience. For whatever
is truly eternal is present equally in all times; and so we, in so far as we are capable of eternity, are influences present in your age.
I said that we seek out all those points in past history where our help is entailed for the fulfilment of the past's own nature, and
that this work of inspiration has become one of our main tasks. How this can be, I shall explain more fully later. Strange it is
indeed that we, who are so closely occupied with the great adventure of racial experience, so closely also with preparations to
face the impending ruin of our world, and with research for dissemination of a seed of life in remote regions of the galaxy, should
yet also find ourselves under obligation toward the vanished and unalterable past.

No influence of ours can save your species from destruction. Nothing could save it but a profound change in your own nature;
and that cannot be. Wandering among you, we move always with fore-knowledge of the doom which your own imperfection
imposes on you. Even if we could, we would not change it; for it is a theme required in the strange music of the spheres.

1 THE WORLD OF THE LAST MEN
i. HOLIDAY ON NEPTUNE
ii. MEN AND MAN
iii. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


i. HOLIDAY ON NEPTUNE