"Stanislaw Lem - One Human Minute" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

II

The second edition of One Human Minute has been expanded by its publisher to include
several new chapters; therefore, a fresh discussion is in order.
This time, the book opens with a picture of the world as mankind's habitation. Such data
can be found in any encyclopedia, but when they are converted to per-minute quantities, they
undeniably produce a greater impression than do the dry, abstract entries in a reference book. It is
indeed curious to realize that there is always a storm raging somewhere on Earth, and that the
number of lightning bolts is constant: six thousand per minute. One hundred strike every second,
and that means perpetually, month after month and century after century. We also learn here that
the Earth covers 1,800 kilometers in the course of a minute of orbiting the Sun. In the same short
interval of time, the combined weight of the cosmic "debris" falling constantly on the Earth's
surface amounts to thousands of tons. At the same time, our planet loses a considerable amount
of its atmosphere, which, stirred by the movements of barometric high and lows, by cyclones and
tradewinds, and also heated by the sun, creates its own "tail" stretching for many thousands of
miles; the Earth loses, as a result, an enormous quantity of gas. New gases, however, constantly
escape from the Earth's depths; the oceans also emit them, partly as water vapor; and so on. The
book, then, commences in the style of popular science. The figures reveal at once the vastness of
the planet in relation to its inhabitants and the incredible minuteness of the planet in relation to
the universe. But it is all, as I said, a laborious extract of natural-history textbooks.
Some of the chapters previously described have been enlarged by the authors with data
now of a humorous, now of a macabre cast. Man as executioner, oppressor, and killer of his own
species was presented to us in the first edition. Now we see what a predator he is, or, if you will,
what a parasite of the entire biosphere -- that is, the animal and plant kingdoms. Almost nobody
sitting down to a steak or chop feels any pang of conscience; we do not even think that in our
complicity with the butchers we are like one who aids a killer in the disposal of the victim's
remains. In order that the thought should never come to mind and interfere with our consumption
of tasty morsels, all languages -- without exception -- have created a separate vocabulary which
gives us special consideration. We pass away; animals can only die. And, of course, every
dictionary of hunting jargon unfailingly exonerates all that is synonymous, in every legal
language, with premeditated murder, since a hunter goes into the woods with a loaded weapon for
the express purpose of killing. One Human Minute goes to the heart of the matter, cutting through
these pharisaical subtleties of our vocabulary, for it gives not the names but the numbers of the
victims. Every minute, it turns out, mountains of animal corpses fall at our hands, and the same
mountains of corpses, in the form of roasts, are chewed by several billion human teeth per
minute. These are like images from Gulliver's travels to Brobdingnag, where a lady giant's
enticing smile might be a scene out of Jaws, with the shark opening its monstrous mouth. As we
know, the brain of a live monkey eaten raw from the opened skull with a spoon is a sophisticated
Chinese delicacy; and though it is unlikely that the quantity of brains consumed per minute in this
way could have been established with much accuracy, one does find the figure under the heading
"Exotic Dishes."
To the eternally shooting geyser of semen this edition has added the river of milk that
flows from the breasts of women all over the world into the mouths of infants.
The human disfigurations that are set apart in a separate chapter -- no doubt for more
powerful effect -- are a silent, natural expression of our fate. It is as if whoever set up this table --
these armies of the blind and deaf, these millions of bodies deformed from birth and by their very
number proving how little Nature truly cares about the individual human being (yet in all
religions and nearly all philosophical systems we try so hard to preserve the human dignity of the
individual), and these separately (pedantically) enumerated infirmities of old age -- it is as if the
author of this table wanted to compare the aged with rusting wrecks or derelict machines, which,