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

for a brief moment I felt a tremor of solidarity, because I understood him.
Later I thought of that mortal agony many times.
The idea of my laughter as a betrayal seems incomplete. Betrayal is the
result of conscious decision, but what causes us to be drawn to destruction?
What black hope, in destruction, beckons man? Its utter inutility rules out
any rational explanation. This hunger has been suppressed in vain by numerous
civilizations. It is as irrevocably a part of us as two-leggedness. To him who
seeks a reason but cannot abide any hypothesis of a design, whether in the
form of Providence or of the Diabolical, there remains only the rationalist's
substitute for demonology -- statistics. Thus it is from a darkened room
filled with the smell of corruption that the trail leads to my mathematical
anthropogenesis. With the formulae of stochastics I strove to undo the evil
spell. But this, too, is only conjecture, therefore a self-defensive reflex of
the mind.
I know that what I am writing here could be, with slight shifts in
emphasis, turned to my favor -- and that some future biographer will try to do
this. He will show that with intellect I conquered my character, achieved a
great victory, but defamed myself out of a desire to do penance. Such labor
follows in the steps of Freud, who has become the Ptolemy of psychology, for
now, with him, anyone can explain human phenomena, raising epicycles upon
epicycles: that construction speaks to us, because it is aesthetic. He
converted the pastoral model into one that was grotesque, unaware that he
remained a prisoner of aesthetics. It was as if the purpose had been to
replace the opera, in anthropology, with tragicomedy.
Let my posthumous biographer not trouble himself. I require no apologia;
all my effort was born of curiosity, untouched by any feeling of guilt. I
wanted to understand -- only to understand, nothing more. For the
disinterestedness of evil is the only support, in man, for the theological
argument; theology answers the question where does a quality come from that
has its origin neither in nature nor in culture. A mind immersed totally in
the human experience, and therefore anthropocentric, might finally agree with
the image of Creation as a somewhat sick joke.
It is an attractive idea, that of a Creator who merely amused Himself,
but here we enter into a vicious circle: we imagine Him sadistic not because
He made us that way, but because we are ourselves that way. Meanwhile the
utter insignificance and smallness of man vis-├а-vis the Universe, of which
science informs us, makes the Manichean myth a concept so primitive as to be
trivial. I will put it in another way: if a creation were to take place --
which personally I cannot conceive -- then the level of knowledge that it
would require would be of such an order that there would be no place in it for
silly jokes. Because -- and this really is the whole credo of my faith --
nothing like the wisdom of evil is possible. My reason tells me that a creator
cannot be a petty scoundrel, a conjurer who toys ironically with what he has
brought into being. What we hold to be the result of a malign intervention
could only make sense as an ordinary miscalculation, as an error, but now we
find ourselves in the realm of nonexistent theologies -- that is, theologies
of fallible gods. But the domain of their constructional practices is nothing
other than the field of my lifework, i.e, statistics.
Every child unwittingly makes the discoveries from which have sprung the
worlds of Gibbs and Boltzmann, because to a child reality appears as a