"Ursula K. LeGuin - The New Atlantis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

a best seller Janet had given me when she left. She thought it was very good, but then she likes Franz
Liszt too. I don't read much since the libraries were closed down, it's too hard to get books; all you can
buy is best sellers. I don't remember the title of this one; the cover just said "Ninety Million Copies in
Print!!!" It was about small-town sex life in the last century, the dear old 1970s when there weren't any
problems and life was so simple and nostalgic. The author squeezed all the naughty thrills he could out of
the fact that all the main characters were married. I looked at the end and saw that all the married
couples shot each other after all their children became schizophrenic hookers, except for one brave pair
that divorced and then leapt into bed together with a clear-eyed pair of government-employed lovers for
eight pages of healthy group sex as a brighter future dawned. I went to bed then, too. Simon was hot, but
sleeping quietly. His breathing was like the sound of soft waves far away, and I went out to the dark sea
on the sound of them.

I used to go out to the dark sea, often, as a child, falling asleep. I had almost forgotten it with my waking
mind. As a child all I had to do was stretch out and think, "the dark seaтАж the dark seaтАж" and soon
enough I'd be there, in the great depths, rocking. But after I grew up it only happened rarely, as a great
gift. To know the abyss of the darkness and not to fear it, to entrust oneself to it and whatever may arise
from itтАФwhat greater gift?

***
We watched the tiny lights come and go around us, and doing so, we gained a sense of space and
of directionтАФnear and far, at least, and higher and lower. It was that sense of space that allowed
us to become aware of the currents. Space was no longer entirely still around us, suppressed by
the enormous pressure of its own weight. Very dimly we were aware that the cold darkness
moved, slowly, softly, pressing against us a little for a long time, then ceasing, in a vast
oscillation. The empty darkness flowed slowly along our unmoving unseen bodies, along them,
past them, perhaps through them; we could not tell.

Where did they come from, those dim, slow, vast tides? What pressure or attraction stirred the
deeps to these slow drifting movements? We could not understand that; we could only feel their
touch against us, but in straining our sense to guess their origin or end, we became aware of
something else: something out there in the darkness of the great currents: sounds. We listened. We
heard.

So our sense of space sharpened and localized to a sense of place. For sound is local, as sight is
not. Sound is delimited by silence; and it does not rise out of the silence unless it is fairly close,
both in space and in time. Though we stand where once the singer stood we cannot hear the voice
singing; the years have carried it off on their tides, submerged it. Sound is a fragile thing, a
tremor, as delicate as life itself. We may see the stars, but we cannot hear them. Even were the
hollowness of outer space an atmosphere, an ether that transmitted the waves of sound, we could
not hear the stars; they are too far away. At most, if we listened we might hear our own sun, all
the mighty, roiling, exploding storm of its burning, as a whisper at the edge of hearing.

A sea wave laps one's feet: It is the shock wave of a volcanic eruption on the far side of the world.
But one hears nothing.

A red light flickers on the horizon: It is the reflection in smoke of a city on the distant mainland,
burning. But one hears nothing.

Only on the slopes of the volcano, in the suburbs of the city, does one begin to hear the deep
thunder, and the high voices crying.