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

transmitted instantly to everyone. In that empathy there also may be envy and even a little
irritation, because everyone knows he could never experience ecstasy by drinking that lemonade
or using that toilet paper. Everyone knows that this Arcadia is inaccessible, but its glow is
effective nevertheless.
Anyway, it was clear to me from the start that advertising, as it improves in the
merchandising struggle for existence, will enslave us not through the better quality of the goods it
promotes but as a result of the ever-worsening quality of the world. After the death of God, of
high ideals, of honor, of altruism, what is left to us in our overcrowded cities, under acid rains,
but the ecstasy of these men and women of the ads as they announce crackers, puddings, and
spreads like the coming of the Heavenly Kingdom? Because advertising, with monstrous
effectiveness, attributes perfection to everything -- and so to books, to every book -- a person is
beguiled by twenty thousand Miss Universes at once and, unable to decide, lingers unfulfilled in
amorous readiness like a sheep in a stupor. So it is with everything. Cable television,
broadcasting forty programs at once, produces in the viewer the feeling that, since there are so
many, others must be better than the one he has on, so he jumps from program to program like a
flea on a hot stove, proof that technological progress produces new heights of frustration.
Although no one said it in so many words, we were promised the world, everything -- if not to
possess, at least to look at and touch. And literature (is it not but an echo of the world, its likeness
and its commentary?) fell into the same trap. Why should I read about what particular individuals
of different or the same sex say before going to bed, if there is no mention of the thousands of
other, perhaps much more interesting people who do more imaginative things? There had to be a
book, then, about what Everybody Else was doing, so that we would be tormented no longer by
the doubt that we were reading nonsense while the Important Things were taking place
Elsewhere.
The Guinness Book was a best seller because it presented nothing but exceptional things,
with a guarantee of authenticity. This panopticon of records had, however, a serious drawback: it
was soon obsolete. No sooner had some fellow eaten forty pounds of peaches complete with pits
than another not only ate more, but died immediately after from a volvulus, which gave the new
record a dismal piquancy. While it is untrue that there is no such thing as mental illness, that it
was invented by psychiatrists to torment their patients and squeeze money out of them, it is true
that normal people do far madder things than the insane. The difference is that the madman does
what he does disinterestedly, whereas the normal person does it for fame, because fame can be
converted into cash. Of course, some are satisfied with fame alone, so the matter is unclear. In
any case, the still-surviving subspecies of intellectuals scorned this whole collection of records,
and in polite society it was no distinction to remember how many miles someone on all fours
could push a nutmeg with his nose painted lavender.
So a book had to be conceived that resembled the Guinness volume, was serious enough
not to be dismissed with a shrug (like The First Three Minutes), but at the same time was not
abstract, not loaded with theories about bosons and quarks. The writing of such a book -- an
honest, uncontrived book about everything at once, a book that would overshadow all others --
seemed a total impossibility. Even I could not imagine the sort of book it would be. To the
publishers I simply suggested writing a book that at worst would be the perfect antithesis of its
advertising claims; but the idea did not take. Although the work I had in mind might have
attracted readers, since the most important thing today is setting records, and the world's worst
novel would have been a record, it was quite possible that even if I had succeeded, no one would
have noticed.
How sorry I am not to have hit upon the better idea that gave birth to One Human Minute.
Apparently, the publisher does not even have a branch on the Moon; "Moon Publishers," I am
told, is only an advertising ploy. To avoid being called dishonest, the editor sent to the Moon, in a
container on one of the Columbia shuttle flights, a copy of the manuscript and a small computer