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

Long hence, all the energies of that creation will be dissipated, and death will be universal. By then,
perhaps the purpose of the cosmos (if purpose there be, which seems unlikely) will have been achieved;
and with the ceasing of all change, time itself will cease.
But others, rejecting this strange boundless finitude, prefer another fantasy, no less unimaginable to
man. They declare that between the ever-separating, ever-dying galaxies, a new sparse dust of matter is
ever being created, here and there a lonely atom; and that the new matter gathers slowly into nebulae,
which mature into galaxies, each with its million earth-like worlds where man-like beings may emerge
from brutishness. Thus in the infinite host of the galaxies the worlds are infinitely many. Imagination
overstrains and collapses. And for ever, within the interstices and ever-wider-yawning chasms of the
ever-dying, ever-infinitely-expanding universe, an infinite sequence of fresh universes is for ever being
created, in turn to mature and die. If purpose has indeed determined this strange, this seemingly crazy
scheme, it must surely be a purpose infinitely alien to man's desires.
Whichever of the two modern cosmical pictures is the less false to the fads, man's understanding is
defeated. Truth slips between the fingers of the exploring mind.
Yet some such picture we must accept. Gone for ever is the East's great elephant that supports the world
and is supported by a greater tortoise. Gone for ever are the celestial spheres, that box of boxes, which
Dante described, Hell-centred, God-surrounded. Gone too the sun-centred universe within the sphere of
the fixed stars. Gone the uniquenes of the sun's system, the uniqueness of our earth, the uniqueness of
man.
Instead, we must conceive, as best we may, at least a host, perhaps an infinity of habitable earth-like
worlds, each housing its own human or parahuman race.
Yet well it may be, it must be, that both the new pictures of the cosmos, these latest, proudest feats of
terrestrial observation and intelligence, are but a very little nearer to the truth than the East's elephant
and tortoise.
Yes, but for us today they have authority. Some such explosion of ever-receding galaxies, each with its
scattered population of earths, is now the background of all human life.




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Time and Eternity from Death into Life
The seven meditative interludes in the 1946 Death into Life are the most impressive parts of an
otherwise plodding narrative. The fourth, "Time and Eternity," blends autobiography with poetic reverie
in a version of a recurrent motif in Stapledon's writing: his visionary encounter in 1903 with his visiting
nine-year-old Australian cousin and future wife, Agnes Miller. He always spoke of this moment, so like
Dante's first glimpse of Beatrice at age nine in the Vita Nuova, as the wellspring of his creative life.
TODAY! TOMORROW!
Today comprises the whole present universe of infinite detail and inconceivable extent. Today is fields
and houses and the huge sky. Today human creatures are being conceived, are born, are loving, hating,
dying. Electrons and protons in their myriads are everywhere busily performing their unimaginable
antics. Planets attend their suns. Galaxies drift and whirl.
All this today comprises, and with all this the whole past is pastly present in today: Queen Victoria,
Babylon, the ice ages, the condensing of the stars in the primeval nebula, and the initial inconceivable
explosion of creativity.