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

latter's immortality: instead of dying it divides, thereby becoming its own, increasingly numerous
family.
So the task the authors of One Human Minute set themselves did not look plausible. In
effect, were I to tell someone who has not yet seen the book that it contains few words, that it is
filled with tables of statistics and columns of numbers, he would look upon the undertaking as a
flop, even as insanity. Because what can be done with hundreds of pages of statistics? What
images, emotions, and experiences can thousands of numbers evoke in our heads? If the book did
not exist, if it were not lying on my desk, I would say the concept was original, even striking, but
unrealizable, like the idea that reading the Paris and New York telephone books would tell you
something about the inhabitants of those cities. If One Human Minute were not here in front of
me, I would believe it to be as unreadable as a list of telephone numbers or an almanac.
Consequently, the idea -- to show sixty seconds in the lives of all the human beings who
coexist with me -- had to be worked out as if it were a plan for a major campaign. The original
concept, though important, was not enough to ensure success. The best strategist is not the one
who knows he must take the enemy by surprise, but the one who knows how to do it.
What transpires on Earth even during a single second, there is no way of knowing. In the
face of such phenomena, the microscopic capacity of human consciousness is revealed -- our
consciousness, that boundless spirit which we claim sets us apart from the animals, those
intellectual paupers capable of perceiving only their immediate surroundings. How my dog frets
each time he sees me packing my suitcase, and how sorry I am that I cannot explain to him that
there is no need for his dejection, for the whimpers that accompany me to the front gate. There is
no way to tell him that I'll be back tomorrow; with each parting he suffers the same martyrdom.
But with us, it would seem, matters are quite different. We know what is, what can be; what we
do not know, we can find out.
That is the consensus. Meanwhile, the modern world shows us at every step that
consciousness is a very short blanket: it will cover a tiny bit but no more, and the problems we
keep having with the world are more painful than a dog's. Not possessing the gift of reflection, a
dog does not know that he does not know, and does not understand that he understands nothing;
we, on the other hand, are aware of both. If we behave otherwise, it is from stupidity, or else from
self-deception, to preserve our peace of mind. You can have sympathy for one person, possibly
for four, but eight hundred thousand is impossible. The numbers that we employ in such
circumstances are cunning artificial limbs. They are like the cane a blind man uses; tapping the
sidewalk keeps him from bumping into a wall, but no one will claim that with this cane he sees
the whole richness of the world, or even the small fragment of it on his own street. So what are
we to do with this poor, narrow consciousness of ours, to make it encompass what it cannot?
What had to be done to present the one pan-human minute?
You will not learn everything at once, dear reader, but, glancing first at the table of
contents and then at the respective headings, you will learn things that will take your breath
away. A landscape composed not of mountains, rivers, and fields but of billions of human bodies
will flash before you, as on a dark, stormy night a normal landscape is revealed when a flash of
lightning rends the murk and you glimpse, for a fraction of a second, a vastness stretching toward
all horizons. Though darkness sets in again, that image has now entered your memory, and you
will not get rid of it. One can understand the visual part of this comparison, for who has not
experienced a storm at night? But how can the world revealed by lightning be equated to a
thousand statistical tables?
The device that the authors used is simple: the method of successive approximations. To
demonstrate, let us take first, out of the two hundred chapters, the one devoted to death -- or,
rather, to dying.
Since humanity numbers nearly five billion, it stands to reason that thousands die every
minute. No revelation, that. Nevertheless, our narrow comprehension bumps into the figures here