"Olaf Stapledon - Last And First Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

problems and toils of countless almost identical lives, have been punctuated
by rare moments of racial adventure. Nay, even these few seemingly rapid
events themselves were in fact often long-drawn-out and tedious. They acquire
a mere illusion of speed from the speed of the narrative.
The receding depths of time and space, though they can indeed be
haltingly conceived even by primitive minds, cannot be imaged save by beings
of a more ample nature. A panorama of mountains appears to naive vision almost
as a flat picture, and the starry void is a roof pricked with light. Yet in
reality, while the immediate terrain could be spanned in an hour's walking,
the sky-line of peaks holds within it plain beyond plain. Similarly with time.
While the near past and the near future display within them depth beyond
depth, time's remote immensities are foreshortened into flatness. It is almost
inconceivable to simple minds that man's whole history should be but a moment
in the life of the stars, and that remote events should embrace within
themselves aeon upon aeon.
In your day you have learnt to calculate something of the magnitudes of
time and space. But to grasp my theme in its true proportions, it is necessary
to do more than calculate. It is necessary to brood upon these magnitudes, to
draw out the mind toward them, to feel the littleness of your here and now,
and of the moment of civilization which you call history. You cannot hope to
image, as we do, such vast proportions as one in a thousand million, because
your sense-organs, and therefore your perceptions, are too coarse-grained to
discriminate so small a fraction of their total field. But you may at least,
by mere contemplation, grasp more constantly and firmly the significance of
your calculations.
Men of your day, when they look back into the history of their planet,
remark not only the length of time but also the bewildering acceleration of
life's progress. Almost stationary in the earliest period of the earth's
career, in your moment it seems headlong Mind in you, it is said, not merely
stands higher than ever before in respect of percipience, knowledge, insight,
delicacy of admiration, and sanity of will, but also it moves upward century
by century ever more swiftly. What next? Surely, you think, there will come a
time when there will be no further heights to conquer.
This view is mistaken. You underestimate even the foothills that stand
in front of you, and never suspect that far above them, hidden by cloud, rise
precipices and snow-fields. The mental and spiritual advances which, in your
day, mind in the solar system has still to attempt, are overwhelmingly more
complex, more precarious and dangerous, than those which have already been
achieved. And though in certain humble respects you have attained full
development, the loftier potencies of the spirit in you have not yet even
begun to put forth buds.
Somehow, then, I must help you to feel not only the vastness of time and
space, but also the vast diversity of mind's possible modes. But this I can
only hint to you, since so much lies wholly beyond the range of your
imagination.
Historians living in your day need grapple only with one moment of the
flux of time. But I have to present in one book the essence not of centuries
but of aeons. Clearly we cannot walk at leisure through such a tract, in which
a million terrestrial years are but as a year is to your historians. We must
fly. We must travel as you do in your aeroplanes, observing only the broad