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

reader. If anyone challenged him, he could prove that part of the publishing operation actually did
take place on the Moon, because the computer on the Mare Imbrium read the manuscript over
and over. Perhaps it read without thinking, but that didn't matter: people in publishing houses on
Earth generally read manuscripts the same way.
I should not have struck a satirical note at the beginning of my review, because there is
nothing funny about this book. You may feel indignation; you may take it as an affront to the
entire human race, aimed so skillfully that it is irrefutable, containing nothing but verified facts;
you may console yourself that at least no one can possibly make a film or a television series out
of it -- but it will definitely be worthwhile to think about it, though your conclusions will not be
pleasant.
The book is unmistakably authentic and fantastic -- if, like me, you take "fantastic" to
mean that which goes beyond the limit of our conceptions. Not everyone will agree with me, but I
remain convinced that the poverty of today's fantasy and science fiction lies in the fact that there
is too little of the fantastic in it, in contrast to the reality that surrounds us. Thus, for example, it
turns out that a person with his brain cut in two (there have been many such operations,
especially on epileptics) both is and is not one individual. It happens that such a person, who
appears completely normal, cannot put on trousers, because his right hand pulls them up while his
left lowers them; or that he will embrace his wife with one arm while pushing her away with the
other. It has been shown that in certain cases the right hemisphere of the brain does not know
what the left sees and thinks; so it had to be acknowledged that the splitting of consciousness and
even of personality had been achieved, that, in other words, two people existed in one body. But
other experiments showed no such thing -- not even that sometimes the individual would be
single and sometimes double. The hypothesis that there were one and a half individuals, or two
and something, also fell apart. This is no joke; the question of how many minds reside in such a
person appears to have no answer, and this, indeed, is both real and fantastic. In this and only in
this sense is One Human Minute fantastic.
Although each of us knows that on Earth all the seasons of the year, all climates, and all
hours of the day and night exist together at every moment, we generally do not think about it.
This commonplace, which every elementary-school student knows, or should know, somehow
lies outside our awareness -- perhaps because we do not know what to do with such an
awareness. Every night, electrons, forced to lick the screens of our television sets with frenzied
speed, show us the world chopped up and crammed into the Latest News, so we can learn what
happened in China, in Scotland, in Italy, at the bottom of the sea, on Antarctica, and we believe
that in fifteen minutes we have seen what has been going on in the whole world. Of course, we
have not. The news cameras pierce the terrestrial globe in a few places: there, where an Important
Politician descends the steps of his plane and with false sincerity shakes the hands of other
Important Politicians; there, where a train has derailed -- but not just any derailment will do, only
one with cars twisted into spaghetti and people extracted piece by piece, because there are
already too many minor catastrophes. In a word, the mass media skip everything that is not
quintuplets, a coup d'├йtat (best if accompanied by a respectable massacre), a papal visit, or a royal
pregnancy. The gigantic, five-billion-human backdrop of these events exists for certain, and
anybody who was asked would say, yes, of course he knows that millions of others exist; if he
thinks about it, he might even arrive at the fact that with every breath he takes, so many children
are born and so many people die. It is, nevertheless, a vague knowledge, no less abstract than the
knowledge that, as I write this, an American probe stands immobile in the pale sun on Mars, and
that on the Moon lie the wrecks of a couple of vehicles. The knowledge counts for nothing if it
can be touched with a word but not experienced. One can experience only a microscopic droplet
out of the sea of human destinies that surrounds us. In this respect a human being is not unlike an
amoeba swimming in a drop of water, whose boundaries seem to be the boundaries of the world.
The main difference, I would say, is not our intellectual superiority to the protozoon but the