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

thousands of college professors simultaneously enter their classrooms, theater curtains lift and
drop, floods swallow fields and houses, wars are waged, bulldozers on battlefields push
uniformed corpses into ditches; it thunders and lightnings, it is night, day, dawn, twilight; but no
matter what happens that forty-three-ton impregnating stream of sperm flows without stop, and
the law of large numbers guarantees that it will be as constant as the sum of solar energy striking
Earth. There is something mechanical about this, inexorable, and animallike. How can one come
to terms with an image of humanity copulating relentlessly through all the cataclysms that befall
it, or that it has brought upon itself?
Well, there you have it. Keep in mind that it is impossible to summarize a book that
reduces human affairs to a minimum -- that is, to numbers (there is no more radical method of
cramming phenomena together). The book itself is an extract, an extreme abbreviation of
humanity. In a review one cannot even touch on the most remarkable chapters. Mental illnesses:
it turns out that today there are more lunatics in any given minute than all the people who lived
on Earth for the last several dozen generations. It is as if all of previous humanity consisted,
today, of madmen. Tumors -- in my first medical work thirty-five years ago I called them a
"somatic insanity," in that they are a suicidal turning of the body upon itself -- are an exception to
life's rule, an error in its dynamics, but that exception, expressed in the statistics, is an enormous
Moloch. The mass of cancerous tissue, calculated per minute, is a testimony to the blindness of
the processes that called us into existence. A few pages farther on are matters even more dreary. I
pass over in silence the chapters on acts of violence, rape, sexual perversion, bizarre cults and
organizations. The picture of what people do to people, to humiliate them, degrade them, exploit
them, whether in sickness, in health, in old age, in childhood, in disability -- and this incessantly,
every minute -- can stun even a confirmed misanthrope who thought he had heard of every
human baseness. But enough of this.
Was this book necessary? A member of the French Academy, writing in Le Monde, said
that it was inevitable, it had to appear. This civilization of ours, he wrote, which measures
everything, counts everything, evaluates everything, weighs everything, which breaks every
commandment and prohibition, desires to know all. But the more populous it becomes, the less
intelligible it is to itself. It throws itself with the most fury at whatever continues to resist it.
There was nothing strange, therefore, in its wanting to have its own portrait, a faithful portrait,
such as never existed, and an objective one -- objectivity being the order of the day. So in the
cause of modern technology it took a photograph like those done with a reporter's flash camera:
without touch-ups.
The old gentleman dodged the question about the need for One Human Minute, saying
that it appeared because, as the product of its time, it had to appear. The question, however,
remains. I would substitute for it another, more modest question: Does this book truly show all of
humanity? The statistical tables are a keyhole, and the reader, a Peeping Tom, spies on the huge
naked body of humanity busy about its everyday affairs. But through a keyhole not everything
can be seen at once. More important, perhaps, is the fact that the observer stands eye to eye, as it
were, not merely with his own species but with its fate. One has to admit that One Human Minute
contains a great deal of impressive anthropological data in the chapters on culture, beliefs, rituals,
and customs, because, although these are numerical agglomerations (or maybe for precisely that
reason), they demonstrate the astonishing diversity of people who are, after all, identical in their
anatomy and physiology. It is curious that the number of languages people employ cannot be
calculated. No one knows precisely how many there are; all we know is that there are over four
thousand. Even the specialists have not identified all of them. The fact that some small ethnic
groups take their languages with them when they die out makes the matter even more difficult to
settle. On top of that, linguists are not in agreement about the status of certain languages,
considered by some to be dialects, by others separate taxonomic entities. Few are the cases,
however, where the Johnsons admit defeat in the conversion of all data to events per minute. Yet