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

will, I have decided, finally, to make of this fragment, necessary for an
understanding of the whole, the preface. The title, His Master's Voice, was
suggested to me by the publisher, John Keller, whom I wish to take this
opportunity to thank for the great care he has given to the publication of
this last work of Professor Hogarth. I should also like to express here my
gratitude to Mrs. Rosamond Schelling, who so painstakingly assisted in the
initial editing and in the final proofreading.

Professor Thomas V. Warren
Mathematics Department
Washington University, D.C.
June 1966




Preface

Though I may shock many readers with the words that follow, it is my
duty, I am convinced, to speak them. I never before wrote a book like this;
and, since it is not the custom for mathematicians to introduce their works
with statements of a personal nature, I could have spared myself the trouble.
It was as a result of circumstances beyond my control that I became
involved in the events that I wish to relate here. The reasons I preface the
account with a kind of confession should become evident later on. In speaking
of myself, I must choose some frame of reference; let this be the recent
biography of me penned by Professor Harold Yowitt. Yowitt calls me a mind of
the highest caliber, in that the problems that I attacked were always, among
those currently available, the most difficult. He shows that my name was to be
found wherever the heritage of science was in the process of being torn down
and the edifice of new concepts raised -- for example, in the mathematical
revolution, in the field of physico-ethics, or in the Master's Voice Project.
When I came, in my reading, to the place where the subject was
destruction, I expected, after the mention of my iconoclastic inclinations,
further, bolder inferences, and thought that at last I had found a biographer
-- which did not overjoy me, because it is one thing to strip oneself, and
another, entirely, to be stripped. But Yowitt, as if frightened by his own
acumen, then returned -- inconsequently -- to the accepted version of me as
the persistent, modest genius, and even trotted out a few of the old-standby
anecdotes about me.
So I could set this book on the shelf with my other biographies, calmly,
little dreaming, at the time, that I would soon be entering the lists with my
flattering portraitist. I noted, also, that not much space remained on the
shelf, and recalled what I had once said to Yvor Baloyne, that I would die
when the shelf was filled. He took it as a joke, and I did not insist, though
I had expressed a genuine conviction, no less genuine for being absurd. And
therefore -- to return to Yowitt -- once again I had succeeded, or, if you
like, failed, in that at the age of sixty-two I had twenty-eight volumes
devoted to my person and yet remained completely unknown. But am I being fair?
Professor Yowitt wrote about me in accordance with rules not of his