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

as if into a wall. This is easy to see, because the words "simultaneously nineteen thousand people
die" carry not one iota more emotional weight than the knowledge that nine hundred thousand are
dying. Be it a million, be it ten million, the reaction will always be the same: a slightly frightened
and vaguely alarmed "Oh." We now find ourselves in a wilderness of abstract expressions; they
mean something, but that meaning cannot be perceived, felt, experienced in the same way as the
news of an uncle's heart attack. Learning of the Uncle's heart attack produces a greater impression
on us.
But this chapter ushers you into dying for forty-eight pages. First come the data
summaries, then the breakdown into specifics. In this way, you look first at the whole subject of
death as through the weak lens of a microscope, then you examine sections in ever-increasing
closeness as if using stronger and stronger lenses. First come natural deaths, in one category, then
those caused by other people, in a separate category, then accidental deaths, acts of God, and so
on. You learn how many people die per minute from police torture, and how many at the hands of
those without government authorization; what the normal curve of tortures is over sixty seconds
and their geographic distribution; what instruments are used in this unit of time, again with a
breakdown into parts of the world and then by nation. You learn that when you take your dog for
a walk, or while you are looking for your slippers, talking to your wife, falling asleep, or reading
the paper, a thousand other people are howling and twisting in agony every consecutive minute of
every twenty-four hours, day and night, every week, month, and year. You will not hear their
cries but you will now know that it is continual, because the statistics prove it. You learn how
many people die per minute by error, drinking poison instead of a harmless beverage. Again, the
statistics take into account every type of poisoning: weedkillers, acids, bases -- and also how
many deaths are the result of mistakes by drivers, doctors, mothers, nurses, and so on. How many
newborns -- a separate heading -- are killed by their mothers just after birth, either on purpose or
through carelessness: some infants are suffocated by a pillow; others fall into a privy hole, as
when a mother, feeling pressure, thought it was a bowel movement, either through inexperience
or mental retardation or because she was under the influence of drugs when the labor began; and
each of these variants has further breakdowns. On the next page are newborns who die through
no one's fault because they are monsters incapable of surviving, or because they are strangled by
the umbilical cord, or because they fall victim to placenta previa or some other abnormality;
again, I am not mentioning everything. Suicides take up a lot of space. Today there are far more
ways of depriving oneself of life than in the past, and hanging has fallen to sixth place in the
statistics. Moreover, the frequency-distribution table for new methods of suicide indicates that
there has been an increase in methods since best-selling manuals have come out with instructions
on making death swift and certain -- unless someone wants to go slowly, which also happens.
You can even learn, patient reader, what the correlation is between the size of the editions of
these how-to suicide books and the normal curve of successful suicides. In the old days, when
people were amateurs at it, more suicide attempts could be foiled.
Next, obviously, come deaths from cancer, from heart attacks, from the science of
medicine, from the four hundred most important diseases; then come accidents, such as
automobile collisions, death from falling trees, walls, bricks, from being run over by a train, from
meteors even. Whether it is comforting to know that casualties from falling meteors are rare, I am
not sure. As far as I can remember, 0.0000001 person per minute dies that way. Obviously, the
Johnsons did solid work. In order to present the scope of death more accurately, they applied the
so-called cross-reference, or diagonal method. Some tables will tell you from what group of
causes people die; others, in what ways they die from a single cause -- for example, electric
shock. This method brings into relief the extraordinary wealth of our deaths. Death occurs most
frequently from contact with an improperly grounded appliance, less often in the tub, and least
often while urinating off a pedestrian bridge onto high-tension wires, this being only a fractional
number per minute. In a footnote the conscientious Johnsons inform us that it is impossible to