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

fundamentally much as before, few would call me rash.
Yesterday the events which are now so vividly present and actual were in the main inscrutable and not
yet determined. And therefore yesterday they had, we say, no being. And yet, and yet-there are moments
when we vaguely sense that, just as the past is eternally real, though pastly, so the future also is eternally
what in fact it will be, though for a while futurely to the ever-advancing present. We move forward, and
the fog recedes before us, revealing a universe continuous with the present universe, and one which, we
irresistibly feel, was there all the while, awaiting us. Could we but by some magic or infra-red
illumination pierce the fog-wall, we should see the future universe as in fact it is. So at least we
sometimes irresistibly feel. My conversation with that lovely and serious travelling companion-was it
not always there, awaiting me, knit irrevocably into the future as it is now irrevocably knit into the past?
When I was born, was not that journey awaiting me? Through the interplay of external causation and my
own freely choosing nature, was not that happy encounter already a feature of the eternal fact, though
futurely? Was it not equally so when the Saxons first landed on this island, and when the island itself
took shape, and when the sun gave birth?
And fifteen thousand yesterdays ago, when you and I first looked at each other, was not our future even
then just what in fact it has been? It was of course related to us futurely, and was therefore inaccessible;

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but was it not all the while there, lying in wait for us? One does not suppose that the centre of the earth,
because it is inaccessible, is therefore blankly nothing, until someone shall burrow down to it.
And indeed I cannot even be sure that in that moment of our first meeting the future was, in very truth,
wholly inaccessible. For in looking into your eyes I did (how I remember it!) have a strange, a startling
experience, long since dismissed as fantasy, yet unforgettable. It was as though your eyes were for me
windows, and as though curtains were drawn aside, revealing momentarily a wide, an unexpected and
unexplored prospect, a view obscure with distance, but none the less an unmistakable prevision of our
common destiny. I could not, of course, see it clearly; for it was fleeting, and I was a boy and simple.
But I saw, or I seemed to see, what now I recognize as the very thing that has befallen us, the thing that
has taken so long to grow, and is only now in these last years flowering. Today our hair is greying, our
faces show the years. We can no longer do as once we did. But the flower has opened. And strangely it
is the very flower that once I glimpsed even before the seed was sown.
Fantasy, sheer fantasy? Perhaps! But when we think of time and of eternity, intelligence reels. The
shrewdest questions that we can ask about them are perhaps falsely shaped, being but flutterings of the
still unfledged human mentality.
The initial creative act that blasted this cosmos into being may, or may not (or neither), be in eternity co-
real with today, and with the last faint warmth of the last dying star.




The Reflections of an Ambulance Orderly
Written in Belgium in 1916 after the passage in England of the Military Service Act, this short article
appeared in the Quaker newspaper, The Friend, on 14 April. At the time Stapledon, who was not a
member of the Society of Friends, was a driver for the Friends' Ambulance Unit, and the Unit was torn
over the question of whether to withdraw its pacifist volunteers to face imprisonment in England as
absolute conscientious objectors or to continue the "compromise" of working alongside the battlefields,
tending and transporting the wounded and evacuating both civilians and soldiers during poison gas
attacks. In April Stapledon's convoy was based in the towns of Crombeke and Woes ten (identified only
as "W" in the article because of military censorship rules) near the Franco-Belgian border, and everyone