"Olaf Stapledon - Odd John" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

JOHN AND THE AUTHOR

WHEN I told John that I intended to write his biography, he laughed. "My dear man!" he said,
"But of course it was inevitable." The word "man" on John's lips was often equivalent to "fool."
"Well," I protested, "a cat may look at a king."
He replied, "Yes, but can it really see the king? Can you, puss, really see me?"
This from a queer child to a full-grown man.
John was right. Though I had known him since he was a baby, and was in a sense intimate
with him, I knew almost nothing of the inner, the real John. To this day I know little but the
amazing facts of his career. I know that he never walked till he was six, that before he was ten he
committed several burglaries and killed a policeman, that at eighteen, when he still looked a
young boy, he founded his preposterous colony in the South Seas, and that at twenty-three, in
appearance but little altered, he outwitted the six warships that six Great Powers had sent to seize
him. I know also how John and all his followers died.
Such facts I know; and even at the risk of destruction by one or other of the six Great Powers,
I shall tell the world all that I can remember.
Something else I know, which will be very difficult to explain. In a confused way I know why
he founded his colony. I know too that although he gave his whole energy to this task, he never
seriously expected to succeed. He was convinced that sooner or later the world would find him
out and destroy his work. "Our chance," he once said, "is not as much as one in a million." And
then he laughed.
John's laugh was strangely disturbing. It was a low, rapid, crisp chuckle. It reminded me of
that whispered crackling prelude which sometimes precedes a really great crash of thunder. But
no thunder followed it, only a moment's silence; and for his hearers an odd tingling of the scalp.
I believe that this inhuman, this ruthless but never malicious laugh of John's contained the key
to all that baffles me in his character. Again and again I asked myself why he laughed just then,
what precisely was he laughing at, what did his laughter really mean, was that strange noise
really laughter at all, or some emotional reaction incomprehensible to my kind? Why, for
instance, did the infant John laugh through his tears when he had upset a kettle and was badly
scalded? I was not present at his death, but I feel sure that, when his end came, his last breath
spent itself in zestful laughter. Why?
In failing to answer these questions, I fail to understand the essential John. His laughter, I am
convinced, sprang from some aspect of his experience entirely beyond my vision. I am therefore,
of course, as John affirmed, a very incompetent biographer. But if I keep silence, the facts of his
unique career will be lost for ever. In spite of my incompetence, I must record all that I can, in the
hope that, if these pages fall into the hands of some being of John's own stature, he may
imaginatively see through them to the strange but glorious spirit of John himself.
That others of his kind, or approximately of his kind, are now alive, and that yet others will
appear, is at least probable. But as John himself discovered, the great majority of these very rare
supernormals, whom John sometimes called "wide-awakes," are either so delicate physically or
so unbalanced mentally that they leave no considerable mark on the world. How pathetically one-
sided the supernormal development may be is revealed in Mr. J. D. Beresford's account of the
unhappy Victor Stott. I hope that the following brief record will at least suggest a mind at once
more strikingly "superhuman" and more broadly human.
That the reader may look for something more than an intellectual prodigy I will here at the
outset try to give an impression of John's appearance in his twenty-third and last summer.
He was indeed far more like a boy than a man, though in some moods his youthful face would
assume a curiously experienced and even patriarchal expression. Slender, long limbed, and with
that unfinished coltish look characteristic of puberty, he had also a curiously finished grace all his