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

stagnant well. The featureless darkness, the complete lack of all sen-sation, terrified me, if I may call "terror" the
repugnance and foreboding which I now experienced without any of the bodily accompaniments of terror, without any
sensation of trembling, sweating, gasping or palpitation. Forlornly, and with self-pity, I longed for home, longed to see
once more the face that I knew best. With the mind's eye I could see her now, sitting by the fire sewing, a little furrow
of anxiety between her brows. Was my body, I wondered, lying dead on the heather? Would they find it there in the
morning? How would she confront this great change in her life? Certainly with a brave face; but she would suffer.
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But even while I was desperately rebelling against the dis-solution of our treasured atom of community, I was aware
that something within me, the essential spirit within me, willed very emphatically not to retreat but to press on with this
amazing voyage. Not that my longing for the familiar human world could for'.a moment be counterbalanced by the mere
craving for adventure. I was of too home-keeping a kind to seek serious danger and discomfort for their own sake. But
timidity was overcome by a sense of the oppor-tunity that fate was giving me, not only to explore the depths of the
physical universe, but to discover what part life and mind were actually playing among the stars. A keen hunger now
took possession of me, a hunger not for adventure but for insight into the significance of man, or of any manlike
beings in the cosmos. This homely treasure of ours, this frank and spring-making daisy beside the arid track of modem
life, impelled me to accept gladly my strange adventure; for might I not discover that the whole universe was no mere
place of dust and ashes with here and there a stunted life, but actually beyond the parched terrestrial waste land, a
world of flowers?
Was man indeed, as he sometimes desired to be, the grow-ing point of the cosmical spirit, in its temporal aspect at
least? Or was he one of many million growing points? Or was mankind of no more importance in the universal view
than rats in a cathedral? And again, was man's true function power, or wisdom, or love, or worship, or all of all these?
Or was the idea of function, of purpose, meaningless in relation to the cosmos? These grave questions I would
answer. Also I must learn to see a little more clearly and confront a little more rightly (so I put it to myself) that which,
when we glimpse it at all, compels our worship.
I now seemed to my self-important self to be no isolated individual, craving aggrandizement, but rather an emissary
of mankind, no, an organ of exploration, a feeler, 'projected by the living human world to make contact with its fellows
in space. At all cost I must go forward, even if my trivial earthly life must come to an untimely end, and my wife and
children be left without me. I must go forward; and somehow, some day, even if after centuries of interstellar travel, I
must return.
When I look back on that phase of exaltation, now that I have indeed returned to earth after the most bewildering
adventures, I am dismayed at the contrast between the spirit-ual treasure which I aspired to hand over to my fellow
men and the paucity of my actual tribute. This failure was per-
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haps due to the fact that, though I did indeed accept the challenge of the adventure, I accepted it only with secret
reservations. Fear and the longing for comfort, I now recog-nize, dimmed the brightness of my will. My resolution, so
! boldly formed, proved after all frail. My unsteady courage often gave place to yearnings for my native planet. Over
and i over again in the course of my travels I had a sense that, | owing to my timid and pedestrian nature, I missed
the most significant aspects of events. ;

Of all that I experienced on my travels, only a fraction 1 ò was clearly intelligible to me even at the time; and then,
as I shall tell, my native powers were aided by beings of super-human development. Now that I am once more on my
native planet, and this aid is no longer available, I cannot recapture even so much of the deeper insight as I formerly
attained. And so my record, which tells of the most far-reaching of all human explorations, turns out to be after all no
more reliable than the rigmarole of any mind unhinged by the impact of . experience beyond its comprehension.
To return to my story. How long I spent in debate with myself I do not know, but soon after I had made my
decision, the absolute darkness was pierced once more by the stars. I was apparently at rest, for stars were visible in
every direc-tion, and their color was normal.
But a mysterious change had come over me. I soon dis-covered that, by merely willing to approach a star, I could
set myself in motion toward it, and at such a speed that I must have traveled much faster than normal light. This, as I
knew very well, was physically impossible. Scientists had assured me that motion faster than the speed of light was