"Olaf Stapledon - Rare stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

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Rare Olaf Stapledon




The Heavens Declare-Nothing from The Opening of the Eyes
At his death in 1950 Stapledon left a nearly complete text of fifty-four interlaced meditations addressed
to an unnamed "you" - deity or, to use his term, "daimon." The manuscript was edited by his wife Agnes
and published in 1954 as The Opening of the Eyes. As in much of his fiction, Stapledon was searching
for a spiritual language adequate to the modern world, one that could encompass the newest
understandings of physics: the big bang, the expanding universe, entropy. Meditation 32, "The Heavens
declare - Nothing," is a response to Psalm 19, which opens: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and
the firmament showeth his handiwork." It is one of the most concise statements of Stapledon's agnostic
piety, his earnest attempt to yoke science and theology, to reconcile spiritual longing with intellectual
skepticism. For Stapledon the night sky replete with countless stars was at once a scene of never-failing
beauty and a profound dilemma. It is viewed in this meditation from the prospect of Caldy Hill on the
Wirral peninsula, overlooking the town of West Kirby and the Irish Sea. His parents' house stood on
Caldy Hill, and he evoked this landscape in his first published book Latter-Day Psalms and most
memorably in his greatest, Star Maker. Indeed, The Opening of the Eyes is in many respects similar in
mood to Star Maker, though here the dark night of a soul struggling to understand a remote and
disturbing spiritual entity is portrayed with greater intimacy and simplicity.
ON THIS MOONLESS and star-brilliant night, I have come out on to the hill yearning to find you, if not
in my heart, then in the heavens. But in my heart and mind you are silent, and the constellations are not
your features. The heavens declare nothing. The human lights of the town beneath me tell me nothing.
Beyond the houses the sea is nothing but a flat darkness.
Overhead a flight of geese, unseen but vocal, momentarily eclipse one star.

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To the eye of imagination, the great earth has become visibly a sphere; now great, but now a granule in
the huge void. Bright Jupiter lies far afield. The vault of the sky, no longer a pricked black tent, is
expanded to be depth beyond depth of empty darkness, with here and there a sun, reduced by distance to
a mere punctual star. The Milky Way, that vague over-arching stain, is seen now as a tenuous dust of
suns, extending outwards disc-wise, far afield beyond the constellations. The blackness around the pole
is deep beyond all sounding, is space boundless; wherein the immense galaxy itself is but a mote, a
minute wisp of stars. Within that darkness, for imagination's eye, the swarming galaxies drift like
snowflakes; each flake a host of suns, numerous as the sand; each flake the matrix of a million earth-like
worlds. The whole unnumbered multitude of the galaxies, so some astronomers say, bursts ever apart,
the more remote of them racing away faster than light's own speed; inaccessible, therefore, to vision.
Some surmise that the boundless throng of many million galaxies is finite. Space itself, though
boundless, they say, is finite, and mysteriously re-entrant upon itself. Imagination, they say, cannot
picture this truth, which mathematics alone, with its exact symbols, can precisely figure. In this view, the
galaxies, stars, worlds, and even the very electrons, are numerable. There are just so many of them and
no more. Long ago there was a single creative and explosive act, first cause of this expanding universe.