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

of "bionic dolls," because there were various artificial females -- complete with built-in tape
recorders, so that with various cassettes they could express themselves charmingly or obscenely,
according to taste -- but almost no male dolls for sale. The situation has improved to a point
where equality of the sexes has nearly been achieved. The dolls, battery-powered and self-
charging, and therefore portable, work so well that they can actually pair up and dispense with
living partners altogether. Ridiculous. But the hunger for sexual experience does seem to be
insatiable in affluent nations of the "permissive" type. It turns out that they spend more on
lingerie, gowns, cosmetics, wigs, and perfumes for these artificial partners -- per minute -- than
the countries of the Third World spend on all their clothing essentials.
Data that could not be established or even statistically approximated, such as how many
women are raped per minute, are presented, with scrupulous qualifications, as conjectures: the
experts of this sad phenomenon maintain that the majority of rape victims hide their shame in
silence. Since, however, no one of either sex today need be ashamed of homosexuality or conceal
it, One Human Minute presents their several-million-strong ranks with great numerical precision.
As we leaf through this thick volume -- thicker than the first edition -- we encounter, from
time to time, data that tell us that we live in an era where the flowering of art is barely
distinguishable from its demise. The rules and boundaries that distinguish art from what cannot
be art have eroded completely and disappeared. Thus, on the one hand, more works of art are
being created in the world than cars, planes, tractors, locomotives, and ships combined. On the
other hand, that great volume is lost, as it were, in the still greater volume of objects that have no
use whatever. For me these numbers gave rise to black thoughts. First, the world of art has been
shattered once and for all, and no art lover can piece things together again, even if he is only
interested in one area, like painting or sculpture. One might think that the technology of
communication had advanced for the express purpose of revealing to us the microscopic capacity
of the human brain. What good is it if everything that is beautiful lies at our disposal, and can
even be called up on the screen of a home computer, if we are -- again -- like a child facing the
ocean with a spoon? And, as I glanced at the tables of how many different kinds of "works of art"
are made per minute (and of what materials), I was saddened by the banality of those works. If
archaeologists in the distant future make excavations to learn what kind of graphic art was
produced in our era, they will find nothing. They will not be able to distinguish our everyday
garbage and litter from our "works of art," because often there is no objective difference between
them. That a can of Campbell's tomato soup is a work of art is the result of its being put on
exhibit, but when it lies in some dump no one will ever gaze upon it in aesthetic rapture like an
archaeologist contemplating the vase or marble goddess he has recovered from the Greek silt.
One might conclude that the real intention of the authors of One Human Minute was not to give
us a frozen moment of the human world, a cross section cut with a gigantic knife, but instead to
bury us beneath an avalanche of numbers proving how close we have come to the anecdote about
the flies (a pair of flies, after one season of unchecked proliferation, will cover the oceans and the
earth with a layer of insects half a mile deep).
Again we have the dilemma on which the first critics of this book broke their teeth. Is the
terrible predominance of evil over good, of malice over loving kindness, of stupidity over
intelligence, the true balance sheet of the human world? Or is it the result, in part, of the
computers and the statistical viewpoint?
It is easier to give the tonnage per minute that the sex industry produces -- the mountains
of genital appliances, photographs, special clothing, chains, whips, and other accessories that
facilitate the application of our reproductive physiology to perverted practices -- than to measure,
weigh, or simply observe human love in its nontechnological manifestations. Surely, when people
love one another -- and it is hard to doubt that there are hundreds of millions who do -- when they
remain faithful to their erotic or parental feelings, there is no measure, no apparatus, that can
record that and grind it in the statistical mill. With sadomasochism, on the other hand, with rape,