"Kim Stanley Robinson - A History Of The Twentieth Century2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

because he suspected it might not be working. He was not sixty percent better. And he didn't want to
shift to drug therapy. They had found nothing wrong with his brain, no physical problems at all, and
though that meant little, it did make him resistant to the idea of drugs. He had his reasons and he wanted
his feelings! The light room technician thought that this attitude was a good sign in itself. "Your serotonin
level is normal, right? So it's not that bad. Besides London's a lot farther north than New York, so you'll
pick up the light you lose here. And if you need more you can always head north again, right?"
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He called Charles and Rya Dowland to ask if he could stay with them. It turned out they were leaving for
Florida the next day, but they invited him to stay anyway; they liked having their flat occupied while they
were gone. Frank had done that before, he still had the key on his key-ring. "Thanks," he said. It would
be better this way, actually. He didn't feel like talking. So he packed his backpack, including camping
gear with the clothes, and the next morning flew to London. It was strange how one traveled these days:
he got into a moving chamber outside his hotel, then shifted from one chamber to the next for several
hours, only stepping outdoors again when he emerged from the Camden tube station, some hundred
yards from Charles and Rya's flat. The ghost of his old pleasure brushed him as he crossed Camden High
Street and walked by the cinema, listening to London's voices. This had been his method for years: come
to London, stay with Charles and Rya until he found digs, do his research and writing at the British
Museum, visit the used bookstores at Charing Cross, spend the evenings at Charles and Rya's, watching
TV and talking. It had been that way for four books, over the course of twenty years. The flat was
located above a butcher shop. Every wall in it was covered with stuffed bookshelves, and there were
shelves nailed up over the toilet, the bath, and the head of the guest bed. In the unlikely event of an
earthquake the guest would be buried in a hundred histories of London. Frank threw his pack on the
guest bed and went past the English poets downstairs. The living room was nearly filled by a table
stacked with papers and books. The side street below was an open-air produce market, and he could
hear the voices of the vendors as they packed up for the day. The sun hadn't set, though it was past nine;
these late May days were already long. It was almost like still being in therapy. He went downstairs and
bought vegetables and rice, then went back up and cooked them. The kitchen windows were the color of
sunset, and the little flat glowed, evoking its owners so strongly that it was almost as if they were there.
Suddenly he wished they were. After eating he turned on the CD player and put on some Handel. He
opened the living room drapes and settled into Charles's armchair, a glass of Bulgarian wine in his hand,
an open notebook on his knee. He watched salmon light leak out of the clouds to the north, and tried to
think about the causes of the First World War.
In the morning he woke to the dull thump thump thump of frozen slabs of meat being rendered by an axe.
He went downstairs and ate cereal while leafing through the Guardian, then took the tube to Tottenham
Court Road and walked to the British Museum. Because of The Belle Epoque he had already done his
research on the pre-war period, but writing in the British Library was a ritual he didn't want to break; it
made him part of a tradition, back to Marx and beyond. He showed his still-valid reader's ticket to a
librarian and then found an empty seat in his usual row; in fact he had written much of Entre Deux
Guerres in that very carrel, under the frontal lobes of the great skull dome. He opened a notebook and
stared at the page. Slowly he wrote, 1900 to 1914. Then he stared at the page. His earlier book had
tended to focus on the sumptuous excesses of the pre-war European ruling class, as a young and clearly
leftist reviewer in the Guardian had rather sharply pointed out. To the extent that he had delved into the
causes of the Great War, he had subscribed to the usual theory; that it had been the result of rising
nationa lism, diplomatic brinksmanship, and several deceptive precedents in the previous two decades.
The Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the two Balkan wars had all remained
localized and non-catastrophic; and there had been several "incidents," the Moroccan affair and the like,