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

pect. And ours, with its trivial romantic origin, was doubly suspect.
We had first met when she was a child. Our eyes encoun-tered. She looked at me for a moment with quiet attention;
even, I had romantically imagined, with obscure, deep-lying recognition. I, at any rate, recognized in that look (so I
per-suaded myself in my fever of adolescence) my destiny. Yes! How predestinate had seemed our union! Yet now, in
retro-spect, how accidental! True, of course, that as a long-married couple we fitted rather neatly, like two close trees
whose trunks have grown upwards together as a single shaft, mutual-ly distorting, but mutually supporting. Coldly I
now assessed her as merely a useful, but often infuriating adjunct to my personal life. We were on the whole sensible
companions. We left one another a certain freedom, and so we were able to endure our proximity.
Such was our relationship. Stated thus it did not seem very significant for the understanding of the universe. Yet in
my heart I knew that it was so. Even the cold stars, even the whole cosmos with all its inane immensities could not
con-vince me that this our prized atom of community, imperfect as it was, short-lived as it must be, was not significant.
But could this indescribable union of ours really have any significance at all beyond itself? Did it, for instance,
prove that the essential nature of all human beings was to love, rather than to hate and fear? Was it evidence that all
men and women the world over, though circumstance might prevent them, were at heart capable of supporting a
world-wide, love-knit community? And further, did it, being itself a product of the cosmos, prove that love was in some
way basic to the cosmos itself? And did it afford, through its own felt in-trinsic excellence, some guarantee that we
two, its frail sup-porters, must in some sense have eternal life? Did it, in fact, prove that love was God, and God
awaiting us in bis heaven?
No! Our homely, friendly, exasperating, laughter-making, undecorated though most prized community of spirit
proved none of these things. It was no certain guarantee of anything but its own imperfect rightness. It was nothing
but a very minute, very bright epitome of one out of the many poten-tialities of existence. I remembered the swarms of
the unsee-ing stars. I remembered the tumult of hate and fear and bit-terness which is man's world. I remembered, too,
our own not infrequent discordancy. And I reminded myself that we
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should very soon vanish like the flurry that a breeze has made on still water.
Once more there came to me a perception of the strange contrast of the stars and us. The incalculable potency of
the cosmos mysteriously enhanced the Tightness of our brief spark of community, and of mankind's brief, uncertain
venture. And these in turn quickened the cosmos.
I sat down on the heather. Overhead obscurity was now in full retreat. In its rear the freed population of the sky
sprang out of hiding, star by star.
On every side the shadowy hills or the guessed, featureless sea extended beyond sight. But the hawk-flight of
imagination followed them as they curved downward below the horizon. I perceived that I was on a little round grain of
rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all
the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labor and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent
lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its
social revolu-tions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of stars.
If one could know whether among that glittering host there were here and there other spirit-inhabited grains of rock
and metal, whether man's blundering search for wisdom and for love was a sole and insignificant tremor, or part of a
universal movement!

1. EARTH AMONG THE STARS

Overhead obscurity was gone. From horizon to horizon the sky was an unbroken spread of stars. Two planets
stared, un-winking. The more obtrusive of the constellations asserted their individuality. Orion's four-square shoulders
and feet, his belt and sword, the Plough, the zigzag of Cassiopeia, the intimate Pleiades, all were duly patterned on the
dark. The Milky Way, a vague hoop of light, spanned the sky.
Imagination completed what mere sight could not achieve. Looking down, I seemed to see through a transparent
planet, through heather and solid rock, through the buried grave-yards of vanished species, down through the molten
flow of basalt, and on into the Earth's core of iron; then on again, still seemingly downwards, through the southern