"Utley, Steven - The Real World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Utley Steven)

She clearly did not know what to say in response.

"It's about the lives of the great philosophers," he went on after a moment, "and their thoughts on being and meaning and stuff."

She made a face. "It sounds excruciating."

"It is. I think the great philosophers were all wankers, except for Voltaire, who was funny. Nietzsche was probably the wankiest of the lot."

"Why're you reading it if you think it's so awful?"

"Let's just say I'm in full-tilt autodidact mode these days. Nowadays I carry the same three books with me everywhere I go. This one, a book about quantum mechanics, and the latest edition of the People's Almanac. The almanac's the only one I really enjoy."

"What's that, quantum mechanics?"

"Didn't they teach you anything in school? Advanced physics. Probably just a lot of philosophical wanking set to math. But it interests me. Somewhere between physics and philosophy is the intersection of the real world. Out of our subjective perception of an objective reality of energy and matter comes our interpretation of being and meaning."

"Whatever you say, Uncle Ivan."

"Are you going to this party tomorrow night?"

She shook her head emphatically. "I'm going to a concert with my boyfriend. Anyway, I don't much care for movie people. Oh, some of them are nice, butЧI've never been comfortable around actors. I can never tell when they aren't acting. No, that's not it, it just makes me tired trying to figure out when they're acting and when they're not. The directors are mostly pretentious bores, and the producers just make Daddy crazy." She gazed down the canyon. "The fact is, I don't much like movies. But my boyfriend"Чshe gave him a quick, self-conscious glanceЧ"my boyfriend loves 'em. And he loves dinosaurs. He says he judges a movie by whether he thinks it'd be better or worse with dinosaurs in it."

"Did he have anything to do with that recent version of Little Women?"

"No. He's not in the industry, thank God. I wouldn't go out with anybody who is. I wonder what genius thought of setting Little Women in prehistoric times. Anyway, you'd be surprised how many movies flunk his dinosaur test."

"Probably I wouldn't."

"He and Daddy like sitting around coming up with lunatic premises for movies. What they call high-concept. He cracks Daddy up. Daddy says he could be making movies every bit as bad as anybody else's if he just applied himself."

"Give me an example of high-concept."

" 'Hitler! Stalin! And the woman who loved them both!' " They laughed together. Then she suddenly regarded him seriously. "I hope you're not going to let yourself be overawed by these people."

"People don't awe me." She looked doubtful, so he added, "They can't begin to compete with what awes me."

"What's that? What awes you?"

He leaned sideways in his chair, scooped some dirt out of a flowerbed. "This," he said, and as he went on talking he spread the dirt on his palm and sorted through it with his index finger. "When we were kids, teenagers, while your daddy sat up in his room figuring out how to write screenplays, I was outdoors collecting bugs and fossils. We neatly divided the world between us. He got the arts, I got the sciences. Even our tastes in readingЧwhile he was reading, oh, Fitzgerald and Nabokov, I'd be reading John McPhee and Darwin's journal of the voyage of the Beagle. There was a little overlap. We both went through phases when we read mysteries and science fiction like mad. I'd read The Big Sleep or The Time Machine and pass 'em on to Don, and then we'd discuss 'em. But we were usually interested in different parts of the same books. Don was interested in the characters, the story. Who killed so and so. I loved Raymond Chandler's, Ross Macdonald's descriptions of the southern California landscape. I was like a tourist. My feeling was that setting is as vital as plot and characterization. A good detective-story writer had to be a good travelogue writer, or else his characters and action were just hanging in space. Don argued that a good story could be set anywhere, scenery was just there to be glanced at. If the plot was good, it would work anywhere."

"Daddy says there are only three or four plots. At least he says that out here there are only three or four."

"Well, anyway, your dad and I have art and science all sewed up between us. Science to help us find out what the world is. Art toЧI don't know, art's not my thing, but I thinkЧ"

"Daddy says you're trying to write a book."

"Trying is about as far as I've got so far. I have all the raw material, but Е" But. "I'm not creative. Anyway, I think we have to have both science and art. Everything in the universe partakes in some way of every other thing."

"What about philosophy?"