"Whitley Strieber - Majestic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strieber Whitley)

have given you.
In 1947 somebody from outside this world attempted to form a relationship with mankind. First contact fell to
the United States government. Fresh from victory and full of pride, our generation failed the test. We made a
horrible mess of it. We did not understand the subtle and terrifying - the magnificent - thing that they were.
We made the simplistic assumption that they were something like us - but from another planet. We failed to
see the truth. Failed utterly.
If I may, let me begin with an explanation.
Do you know the word empath? It is the invention of a writer, but it is a true word, a fine word. An empath is
somebody who so completely identifies with the nature of another that they assume that nature. If you met a
perfect empath, or a whole city or nation of perfect empaths, and you introduced them to a vicious
psychopath, the empaths would become monsters.
Because they lack experience, children are empaths. They are blank and clean. At my age it is clear that the
whole of adulthood is an attempt to recover that innocence. History is also such a journey, an attempt to
return to the forest.
These others - who appeared to us as aliens - are empaths, but not because they lack experience. They have
returned to the forest; they are not men, they are beyond that. Like very young children, they are empty of
knowledge: they have become conscious animals. And that is a beautiful thing. In the sight of God they are
almost angels.
They came here to help us find our own version of this wise innocence. We who faced them did not even
begin to understand. We did not understand the awesome portent of Walt Whitman's lines:

There was a child went forth everyday,
And the first object he looked upon,
that object he became . . .
And so when we called them terrible, that is what they became. "Be as little children." What did He mean?
Why did He say it? We have become lost on our long journey back to the woods. When we detonated atomic
bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki we distorted history, setting ourselves on a path that leads not to the
forest but to extinction.
We achieved absolute terror, a darkness so deep it could not be penetrated, not even by light so bright that it
vaporized the eyes. Wise innocents that they are, the others saw our predicament and came to rescue us.
"Regard the lilies of the field," He said. Why, we who are naked in the rain? If we surrender to the wind and
the rain they will be our saviors; the flowers will be our deliverance. We do not need economies, nations,
churches. We need only one another - and the ability to give and bear true love.
This is the message of the others. They thus represent absolute and total change, the collapse of economic
civilization and the end of days. They are freedom; the soul in the open sky. Because they stand for such
radical change we in the government saw them as a threat to the United States.
Instead of proclaiming their arrival up and down the land as we should have, I participated with a group of men
who hid it behind a curtain of denial and ridicule. We posted guardians at the gates and spread a net of
rumors and lies to protect our secret knowledge.
We have with our lies created the impression that an excursion of the pure is an invasion by monsters from
the depths of our own psyche.
In the Bible when a man looks upon the face of an angel he will often cry out, "Woe is me," or, "I have
sinned," or other such words. This is because he sees in those dark angelic eyes a clear reflection of what
he truly is.
In the eyes of the others we who met them saw ourselves.
And there were demons there.

Part One

THE FIELD OF BONES