"Stanislaw Lem - His Masters Voice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

discovered the cracks in the foundation of the Crystal Palace, and after the
latter had shaken it. It was said that I had acted in the spirit of the time.
Well, of course. But an emerald triangle does not cease to be an emerald
triangle when it becomes a human eye in an arranged mosaic.
More than once I have wondered what would have become of me had I been
born within any one of the four thousand cultures we call primitive, which
preceded ours in that gulf of eighty thousand years that our lack of
imagination contracts to the foreground, the foyer, of history proper. In some
of them I would no doubt have languished; but in others, who knows, I might
have found greater personal fulfillment, as one visited, as one creating new
rites, new magic, thanks to the talent I brought into the world, that of
combining elements. Perhaps, in the absence of a restraining curb, which in
our culture is the relativism of every conceptual entity, I could have
consecrated, with no trouble, orgies of havoc and debauchery, because in those
ancient societies they practiced the custom of a temporary, periodic
suspension of daily law, by dissolving their culture (it was the bedrock, the
Constant, the Absolute of their lives, and yet, remarkably, they knew that
even the Absolute required holes!) in order to give vent to the festering mass
of excesses that could not be fitted into any codified system, and of which
only a portion found expression in war masks and family masquerades, under the
bit and bridle of morality.
They were sensible, rational, those severings of societal bonds and
rules, the group madness, the pandemonium liberated, heightened by the
narcotics of rhythm and poison. It was the opening of a safety valve, out of
which poured the factor of destruction; through this particular invention
barbarity was adapted to man. But the principle of a crime from which one
could retire, of a reversible madness, of gaps rhythmically repeated in the
social fabric, has been done away with, and now all those forces must go in
harness, work treadmills, play roles that are too tight for them and always
ill-suited. So they corrode everything quotidian; they hide in every place;
for nowhere is it permitted them to emerge from anonymity. Each of us is, from
childhood, fastened to some publicly allowed piece of himself, the part that
was selected and schooled, and that has gained the consensus omnium; and now
he cultivates that fragment, polishes it, perfects it, breathes on it alone,
that it may develop as well as possible; and each of us, being a part,
pretends to be a whole-like a stump that claims it is a limb.
As far back as I can remember, no ethics ever took root in my
sensitivity. Cold-bloodedly I built myself an artificial ethics. But I needed
to find a reason to do this, because setting up rules in a desert is like
taking Communion without faith. I am not saying that I planned out my life in
as theoretical a manner as I present it here. Nor did I attach axioms to my
behavior retroactively. I proceeded always in the same way, at first unawares;
the motivations I later guessed.
Had I considered myself a person who was basically good, I would have
been quite unable to understand evil. I would have believed that people
perpetrated it always with premeditation -- that is, that they did what they
had resolved to do -- because I would have found no other source of vileness
within my personal experience. But I had better knowledge; I was aware of my
own inclinations, as well as of my blamelessness for them -- blamelessness
because I was, after all, the way I was to begin with, and no one had ever