"Olaf Stapledon - Light and the Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

PREFACE
A REVIEWER OF an earlier book of mine said that it was difficult to see why such a book should ever have been written. From
his point of view the remark was reasonable enough, for the aim of the book happened to fall outside the spot-light of his
consciousness. All the same, the fact that the great majority of books ought never to have been written must give the writer pause.
To-day, what with the paper shortage and the urgency of war work, the question whether a book is worth writing, let alone
publishing, is more pertinent than ever. Whether this book has enough significance to justify its appearance must be left to the
judgment of readers and reviewers; but perhaps they will not take it amiss if I offer a word of explanation.

This book is, of course, not meant to be regarded as prophecy. Neither of the two futures which I here imagine for mankind is in
the least likely to happen. Historical prediction is doomed always to fail. The most sophisticated sociologist, let alone a writer of
fiction, is scarcely a more trustworthy prophet than Old Moore. Certainly I, who entirely failed to foresee the advent of Fascism,
cannot lay claim to describe the next phase of European change.

But this book is not concerned to prophesy. It seeks merely to give a symbolic expression to two dispositions now in conflict in
the world. For lack of better words I call them the will for darkness and the will for the light. I present in concrete form, but rather
as caricature than with photographic accuracy, two kinds of possibility that lie before the human race. The justification for
writing such a book depends on the answers to three questions. Is there such a conflict? Is it important? Is the caricature that I
have drawn of it well enough drawn to clear the mind and stir the heart?

OLAF STAPLEDON
October 1941




Part I - CRISIS



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Darkness and the Light




1 - MAN'S TWO FUTURES

IS IT credible that our world should have two futures? I have seen them. Two entirely distinct futures lie before mankind, one
dark, one bright; one the defeat of all man's hopes, the betrayal of all his ideals, the other their hard-won triumph.

At some date within the age that we call modern, some date not precisely known to me, for I looked back towards it from the
distant futures as though searching in my remote past, the single torrent of terrestrial events is split, as though by a projecting
promontory, so that it becomes thenceforth two wholly distinct and mutually exclusive surging floods of intricate existence, each
one a coherent and actual history, in which the lives of countless generations succeed one another along separate ravines of time.

How can this be? It cannot! Yet I have seen it happen. I have watched those two divergent futures. I have lived through them. In
any world, as on our planet, it needs must happen, when the will for the light and the will for the darkness are so delicately
balanced in the ordinary half-lucid spirits of the world that neither can for long prevail over the other. Out of their age-long stress