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

But tomorrow? It is a wall of impenetrable fog, out of which anything may come.
When we remember or discover the past, we confront something that is what it is, eternally though
pastly. It is such and such, and not otherwise. Our view of it may indeed be false; but it, in itself, is what
in fact it was, however darkly it is now veiled. No fiat, not even an Almighty's, can make the past be
other than in fact it was, and eternally is. God himself, if such there be, cannot expunge for me the deeds
I now regret.
But the future? It is not veiled, it is nothing. It has still to be created. We ourselves, choosing this course
rather than that, must play a part in creating it. Even though we ourselves, perhaps, are but expressions
of the whole living past at work within us, yet we, such as we are, are makers of future events that today
are not. Today the future actuality is nothing whatever but one or other of the infinite host of
possibilities now latent in the present. Or perhaps (for how can we know?) not even latent in the present,
but utterly unique and indeterminate.
Yesterday is palpably there, there, just behind me; but receding deeper and deeper into the past, as I live
onward along the sequence of the new todays.
But tomorrow?
Yesterday I had porridge and toast for breakfast, as on the day before, and the day before that.
Yesterday, according to instruction I caught a train to Preston. I had set my plans so as to reach the
station in good time. And because a thousand other strands of planning had been minutely co-ordinated,
at the appointed minute the engine driver, who had been waiting in readiness for the guard's whistle and

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his waving flag, moved levers. The train crept forward. In that train I found myself sitting opposite a
lovely stranger, not according to instruction, nor as the result of any plan. Soon we were talking, looking
into one another's eyes; talking not of love but of nursing and hospitals and the wished-for planned
society, and of her Christian God, and of a future life, and of eternity. Before we met, before our two
minds struck light from each other, our conversation had no existence anywhere. But then in a fleeting
present we began creating it. And now the universe is eternally the richer because of it, since irrevocably
the past now holds it, now preserves in a receding yesterday that unexpected, that brief and never-to-be-
repeated, warmth and brightness.
With her I have no past but yesterday, and no future; but with you, my best known and loved, I have
deep roots in the past, and flowers too, and the future.
Some fifteen thousand yesterdays ago there lies a day when you were a little girl with arms like sticks
and a bright cascade of hair. In a green silk frock you came through a door, warmed your hands at the
fire, and looked at me for a moment. And now, so real that moment seems, that it might be yesterday!
For that particular fraction of the eternal reality is always queerly accessible to me, though fifteen
thousand yesterdays ago.
But tomorrow?
Tomorrow, shall I, as it has been planned, catch the bus for Chester? Or shall I miss it? Or will it refuse
me, or never start on its journey? Or having absorbed me will it collide with a hearse or a menagerie
van? Will the freed lions and tigers chase people along the street? Shall I feel their huge claws in my
flesh and smell their breath, and know that for me at least there is no tomorrow? Or perhaps some
hidden disease is ready to spring on me tonight? Or a bomb? Or will the laws of nature suddenly change,
so that stones leap from the earth, houses become soaring pillars of rubble and dust, and the sea rush into
the sky? Or will the sky itself be drawn aside like a curtain, revealing God on his throne, his accusing
finger pointing precisely at abject me? Or at a certain moment of tomorrow will everything simply end?
Will there be just nothing any more, no future at all?
I cannot answer these questions with certainty. No man can answer them with certainty. And yet if I
were to bet a million pounds to a penny that things will go on, and half a million that they will go on