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

multitude of possibilities, where each can be taken separately and developed
so easily that it seems almost spontaneous. A child is surrounded by a great
many virtual worlds; completely alien to him is the cosmos of Pascal, a rigid
corpse with even, clocklike movements. The ossified order of maturity later
destroys that primal richness. If this picture of childhood seems onesided,
for example, in that the child owes his inner freedom to ignorance and not
choice -- well, but every picture is one-sided. With the demise of imagination
I inherited its residue, a kind of permanent disagreement with reality, more
like an anger, though, than a rejection. My laughter had already been a
denial, and a more effective kind, perhaps, than suicide. I acknowledge it, at
the age of sixty-two; and the mathematics was only a later consequence of this
attitude. Mathematics was my second desertion.
I speak metaphorically -- but hear me out. I had betrayed my dying
mother, betrayed all people, opting, with the laughter, for a thing of power
greater than theirs, however hideous it was, because I saw no other way out.
Later I would learn that this enemy of ours -- which was everything, which had
built its nest in us as well -- I could also betray, at least to a certain
extent, because mathematics is independent of the world.
Time showed me that I had been doubly mistaken. Genuinely to opt for
death, against life, and for mathematics, against the world, is not possible.
The only true option is one's own annihilation. Whatever we do, we do in life;
and, as experience has demonstrated, neither is mathematics the perfect
retreat, because its habitation is language. That informational plant has its
roots in the world and in us. This comparison has always been with me, even
before I was able to put it into the language of a proof.
In mathematics I searched for what I had valued in childhood, the
multiplicity of worlds, which broke contact with the imposed world, but so
gently that it was as if the latter had been stripped of its force -- a force
that lay within us as well, yet was hidden enough for us to forget its
presence. Later, like every mathematician, I learned to my surprise how
unpredictable and incredibly adaptable is that activity, which at first
resembles a game. One enters into it proudly; without apologies and
unequivocally one shuts out the world; with arbitrary propositions that rival,
in their uncontestableness, Creation, one performs a definitive closure; this
is to separate us from the vortex in which we are forced to live.
And lo, that denial, that most radical break, leads us precisely to the
heart of things, and the flight turns out to have been an attainment, the
desertion -- an appreciation, and the break -- a reconciliation. We make the
discovery, then, that our escape was apparent only, since we have returned to
the very thing we sought to flee. The enemy metamorphoses into an ally; we are
purified; the world gives us to understand, silently, that only by means of it
may we conquer it. Thus our fear is tamed and turns to joy, in that special
refuge whose deepest interiors intersect the surface of the only world.
Mathematics never reveals man to the degree, never expresses him in the
way, that any other field of human endeavor does: the extent of the negation
of man's corporeal self that mathematics achieves cannot be compared with
anything. Whoever is interested in this subject I refer to my articles. Here I
will say only that the world injected its patterns into human language at the
very inception of that language; mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and
can only be discovered, never invented.