"Olaf Stapledon - Starmaker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

THE EARTH

1. THE STARTING POINT

ONE night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill. Dark heather checked my feet. Below marched the
subur-ban lamps. Windows, their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, in-wardly watching the lives of dreams. Beyond the
sea's level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead, obscurity. I distinguished our own house, our islet in the
tumultuous and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we two, so different in quality, had grown
in and in to one another, for mutual support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. There daily we planned our
several undertakings, and recounted the day's oddities and vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to
be darned. There the chil-dren were born, those sudden new lives. There, under that roof, our own two lives,
recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either
alone.
All this, surely, was good. Yet there was bitterness. And bitterness not only invaded us from the world; it welled up
also within our own magic circle. For horror at our futility, at our own unreality, and not only at the world's delirium,
had driven me out on to the hill.
We were always hurrying from one little urgent task to another, but the upshot was insubstantial. Had we, perhaps,
misconceived our whole existence? Were we, as it were, living from false premises? And in particular, this partnership
of ours, this seemingly so well-based fulcrum for activity in the world, was it after all nothing but a little eddy of
complacent and ingrown domesticity, ineffectively whirling on the surface of the great flux, having in itself no depth of
being, and no significance? Had we perhaps after all deceived ourselves? Behind those rapt windows did we, like so
many others, in- deed live only a dream? In a sick world even the hale are sick. And we two, spinning our little life
mostly by rote, sel-
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dom with clear cognizance, seldom with firm intent, were products of a sick world.
Yet this life of ours was not all sheer and barren fantasy. Was it not spun from the actual fibres of reality, which we
gathered in with all the comings and goings through our door, all our traffic with the suburb and the city and with
remoter cities, and with the ends of the earth? And were we not spinning together an authentic expression of our own
nature? Did not our life issue daily as more or less firm threads of active living, and mesh itself into the growing _, ^
web, the intricate, ever-proliferating pattern of mankind?
I considered "us" with quiet interest and a kind of amused awe. How could I describe our relationship even to
myself without either disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality? For this our delicate
balance of dependence and independence, this coolly critical, shrewdly ridiculing, but loving mutual contact, was
surely a microcosm of true community, was after all in its simple style an actual and living example of that high goal
which the world seeks. * *
The whole world? The whole universe? Overhead, obscurity unveiled a star. One tremulous arrow of light, projected
how many thousands of years ago, now stung my nerves with vision, and my heart with fear. For in such a universe as
this what significance could there be in our fortuitous, our frail, our evanescent community?
But now irrationally I was seized with a strange worship, not, surely of the star, that mere furnace which mere
distance falsely sanctified, but of something other, which the dire con-trast of the star and us signified to the heart. Yet
what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering beyond the star, dis-covered no Star Maker, but only darkness;
no Love, no Power even, but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.
 Impatiently I shook off this folly, and reverted from the inscrutable to the familiar and the concrete. Thrusting aside
worship, and fear also and bitterness, I determined to examine more coldly this remarkable "us," this surprisingly
impressive datum, which to ourselves remained basic to the universe, though in relation to the stars it appeared so
slight a thing.
Considered even without reference to our belittling cosmical background, we were after all insignificant, perhaps
ridiculous. We were such a commonplace occurrence, so trite, so re-spectable. We were just a married couple, making
shift to live together without undue strain. Marriage in our time was sus-
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