"Colin Wilson - The Philospher's Stone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Colin)

family vault near Inverness - followed twenty-four hours later. I flew to Scotland with Lady Lyell to be
present. It was a cold, rainy day, and there were only half a dozen other mourners - it had all happened
too suddenly for all his relatives and colleagues to be notified. I should have felt closer than ever to Lady
Lyell, since the two of us were the chief mourners. Instead, I felt completely detached. I could see that
she was miserable about the loss of a husband and a lover; but she could accept the blow as the kind of
misfortune that happens to human beings. And she had consolations. She was still under forty, and more
beautiful than ever; she was rich, and she still enjoyed sport and social occasions.
For me, there was something insanely unreasonable about LyellтАЩs death. I find this difficult to explain.
Hazlitt says that no young person really believes in his own death, no doubt this was still true for me, at
twenty-five. But in a sense, Lyell had become so close to me - or rather, he was always so close,тАЩ from
our first meeting - that he was somehow included in my disbelief in death. The simplest way of explaining
my feeling is to say that I felt he was a twin brother. From the beginning, there had been some odd
psychic bond between us - the kind of deep and total sympathy that I have occasionally seen between
exceptionally happy married couples. It was more than merely personal; it transcended the personal in
our mutual love of science and philosophy. As I stood there in the snow, and watched the coffin carried
into the stone vault, I experienced the hallucinatory belief that I was being buried alive. In the realest
sense, there was a part of me in the coffin. This was why I could feel no sympathy as Jane Lyell burst into
tears and clung to my arm. Her grief was real, but it was not deep; I had seen her cry like this when her
favourite hunter broke his leg and had to be shot.
The next day, I moved to the cottage in Essex where he and I had worked together on Principles of
Microbiology. She remarried a year later, but I never met her again. When I discovered how generously
I had been treated in LyellтАЩs will, I half-expected her to contest it. But to do her justice, she had little of
the mean or petty about her.


Re-reading what I have written, I am aware that I have failed to explain why his death affected me so
violently. But in order to make it clear, I would have to write a detailed account of my twelve years at
Sneinton - during the last seven of which I was his assistant and secretary. And that, in turn, would
require a book as long as BayntonтАЩs Life. He taught me everything I knew: not only in science, but in
philosophy, music, literature, history - even in mathematics, for before I met Lyell, my maths was of the
log-and-slide-rule variety.
Most teenagers suffer all kinds of emotional upsets and frustrations; my own teens were completely free
of such problems. It would give a false impression to say that I was тАШhappyтАЩ, I was totally absorbed in
work. I was an engine working to the limit of its capacity; happiness would have been a pointless
irrelevancy. And since I never had the feeling that тАШthe times are out of jointтАЩ, I somehow took it for
granted that Lyell would live to be a centenarian and that I would attend his funeral in Westminster
Abbey. (I had even chosen the spot, close to DarwinтАЩs grave.) His death at fifty-seven seemed so
murderously stupid that my sense of тАШrightnessтАЩ was shaken. I felt a cold suspicion that I had been living
an illusion for the past twelve years.
Perhaps I should not have gone off on my own; the loneliness: made it worse. Lyell had many friends
who could have helped me, with whom I could have spent the next six weeks, and talked about the
conflict produced in me by his death. Instead, I went to a lonely cottage, a mile from the nearest village.
There were heavy wooden shutters up at all the windows, and when I took them down, I could look out
on the sea, with its endless, meaningless movement. I tried to work, but it was hopeless. I sat for hours in
the window seat, staring at the sea I had had no experience in self expression or introspection And since
I felt no desire to read or listen to the radio or watch the television, my feelings coagulated, catalysed by
boredom.
I think I became a little insane. There was some obscure force struggling inside me, but I felt no desire to
do anything. One night, I took a walk on the beach, and looked up at the sky, and wondered how I
could ever have taken any interest in the stars. They were dead worlds; and even if they werenтАЩt dead,