"Henry Kuttner - The Time Axis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

"I know, I know. He has a high irritant value. But the man had genius, just the same. His concept
of the community, moving through its course from 'culture' to dead and petrifying 'civilization'
is what happened to the city of the Face.

"I said happened' because I have to use the past tense for that nekropolis of the future. It
exists. It has accomplished itself in time as fully as Babylon or Rome. And the men in it are not
men at all in the sense we know. They are gods."

He looked at me as if he expected me to object. I said nothing.

"They are gods," He went on. "Spengler was wrong, of course, in thinking of any human progress in
one simple, romantic curve. You have only to compare fourteenth century Rome with sixteenth
century Rome to see that a nekropolis, as Mumford calls it, can pull itself together and become a
metropolis again, a living, vitaLunit in human culture.

"I have no quarrel with Spengler in his interpretations of a culture within itself. But both he


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and Toynbee went astray in their ideas of the symbolic value of a city. When you go further into
the Record you'll see what I mean."

He paused, put out a large hand and fumbled in a dish of fruit on the table at his elbow. He found
an orange and peered at it dubiously, hefted it once or twice, then closed his fingers over it and
went on with his discourse.

"In a moment," he said, "I want to show you something with this orange as an illustration. First,
however, I must do Spengler the1 justice of allowing the validity of his theories, in the
ultimate. The City of the Face has run its course. It is a nekropolis, in the .sense that Mumford
uses the term.

"In our times, a nekropolis such as Rome once was, and such as New York must be someday, needn't
mean the end of our civilization, because a city isn't a whole nation. There were outlying
villages that flourished all the better when

Rome ceased to dominate their world. When the dark ages closed over Europe it wasn't by
any means the end of the civilized world-^elsewhere on the planet new cultures were rising and old
ones flourishing. "But the City of the Face is a very different matter. "That City is really
Nekropolis and there are no outlying villages to carry on, no outlying cultures rising toward
fruition. In all that world there is only the one great City where mankind survives. And
they aren't menтАФthey are gods. Gods, sir!"

"Then it can't really be a nekropolis," I objected. ' "It need not be. That's up to us." "How?"

"You saw my hearth. Dr. Essen showed you the stain of plague that is creeping across it. Oh yes,
my friend, that stain is spreading! Slowly, but with a rate of growth that increases as it goes.
The negative matterтАФno, not even negative. Not even that. But it happened to the world of the