"Victor Pelevin. Babylon (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

Tatarsky suddenly thought of a potential advertising concept for
fly-agarics. It was based on the startling realisation that the supreme form
of self-realisation for fly-agarics is an atomic explosion - something like
the glowing non-material body that certain advanced mystics acquire. Human
beings were simply a subsidiary form of life that the fly-agarics exploited
in order to achieve their supreme goal, in the same way as human beings
exploited mould for making cheese. Tatarsky raised his eyes towards the
orange rays of the sunset and the flow of his thoughts was abruptly broken
off.
'Listen,' Gireiev said after a few more minutes' silence, 'I just
thought about Lyosha Chikunov again. Sad about him, isn't it?'
'Yeah, it is,' Tatarsky replied.
'Weird, that - he's dead, and we're alive ... Only I suspect that every
time we lie down and sleep, we die just the same way. And the sun disappears
for ever, and all history comes to an end. And then non-existence just gets
sick of itself and we wake up. And the world comes into existence all over
again.'
'How can non-existence get sick of itself?'
'Every time you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does
everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning
wakening with something else, something quite impossible even to think
about. We don't even have the instrument to do it, because our mind and our
world are the same thing.'
Tatarsky tried to understand what this meant. He noticed that thinking
had became difficult and even dangerous, because his thoughts had acquired
such freedom and power that he could no longer control them. The answer
appeared to him immediately in the form of a three-dimensional geometrical
figure. Tatarsky saw his own mind: it was a white sphere, like a sun but
absolutely calm and motionless. Dark, twisted fibrous threads extended from
the centre of the sphere to its periphery. Tatarsky realised that they were
his five senses. The fibres that were a little thicker were sight, the ones
a bit thinner than those were hearing, and the others were almost invisible.
Dancing and meandering around these motionless fibres was a winding spiral,
like the filament of an electric-light bulb. Sometimes it would align itself
for a moment with one of them; sometimes it would curl up around itself to
form a glowing circle of light like the one left by the lighted tip of a
cigarette swirled rapidly in the dark. This was the thought with which his
mind was occupied.
'That means there is no death/ Tatarsky thought happily. 'Why? Because
the threads disappear, but the sphere remains!'
He was filled with happiness at having managed to formulate the answer
to a question that had tormented humanity for the last several thousand
years in terms so simple anyone could understand them. He wanted to share
his discovery with Gireiev, and taking him by the shoulder he tried to
pronounce this final phrase out loud. But his mouth spoke something else,
something meaningless - all the syllables that made up the words were still
there, but they were jumbled up chaotically. Tatarsky thought he needed a
drink of water, and so he said to Gireiev, who was staring at him in fright:
'Li'd winker drike I watof!'
Gireiev obviously didn't understand what was going on; but it was clear