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

meat and gherkins from the refrigerator, then slept on the settee downstairs, where I could see the
moonlight on the sea. Again, I slept heavily and late.
I woke up with a headache and a hangover of conscience. But still I felt in no mood for scientific work. I
spent a thoroughly wretched day, bored, self-divided, irritable. In the afternoon, I forced myself to take a
bathe in the sea, but it was so cold that I was completely numb after a few minutes. I went indoors and
dried myself, then wandered aimlessly around the house, glancing at bookshelves, leafing my way through
magazines. The Lyells had often spent weekends here, so there were a great many books and magazines
belonging to Lady Lyell - books on horses and dogs and sailing, copies of Vogue and The Tatler and
Country Life. An hour of browsing through these made me feel suicidal - that most human beings are
little better than apes. Then I came across LyellтАЩs books on wine. Some of these had fine colour plates,
showing vineyards of the Rhine, Burgundy and so on, and I stared at them with the pleasure that comes
from the impersonality of hills. Then I remembered that Lyell kept some wine in the cellar - it was a
matter in which I had never taken any interest. I went down to look. It was a good collection for such a
small cellar - some hundred or so cases arranged in racks. Another dozen cases were piled near the
door, waiting to be opened. I looked into one, and found that it contained claret - Chateau
Brane-Cantenac, one of LyellтАЩs favourite wines. I was overcome by a kind of sentimental nostalgia. I
took a bottle upstairs, opened it, carefully decanted it, and drank down a large glass full. It was too cold.
I stood the decanter in the hearth, by the wood fire, got out the cheese board, and sat down in the
armchair with one of Andr├й SimonтАЩs wine books on my knee. Soon, to my surprise, I found the decanter
empty, and once again, I felt myself, steeped in my own past, seeing my life from a distance. It struck me
then that the main problem of human life is easy to define. We live too close to the present, like a
gramophone needle travelling over a record. We never appreciate the music as a whole because we only
hear a series of individual notes.
I felt the impulse to get this down on paper. I found a clean notebook in the study and started to write. At
one point, I fetched up another bottle of claret, but forgot to drink it. I was writing about my own life,
about experiences that I remembered well, about sudden insights like the one I had just, had. I realised
that all science has simply been manтАЩs attempt to get his nose off the gramophone record, to see things
from a distance, to escape this perpetual tyranny of the present. He invented language and then writing to
try to escape his wormтАЩs eye view of his own existence. Later still he invented art - painting, music,
literature, to try to store the stuff of his living experience. It came to me with a shock that art is really an
extension of science, not its opposite; science tries to store and correlate dead facts; art and literature try
to store and correlate living facts.
And then, the clearest insight of all: science is not manтАЩs attempt to reach тАШtruthтАЩ. He doesnтАЩt want тАШtruthтАЩ
- in the sense of mere тАШfactsтАЩ. He wants wider consciousness, freedom from this strange trap that holds
our noses against the gramophone record. This is why he has always loved wine and music...
I have summarised my conclusions in two paragraphs; but they took me several hours of writing and
several thousands of words. When I had finished, I realised that I had reached a turning point in my life.
Admittedly, I had always known this - instinctively. Now I knew it consciously, and the next question
was clear: is there any straight-forward method, apart from the pursuit of ideas and symbols, for
achieving this wider consciousness, for obtaining those тАШbreathing spacesтАЩ when you feel like a bird,
contemplating your existence from above, instead of from the gutter?
I was sleepy, and I was drunk again. But it wasnтАЩt important. I went to bed, full of a sense of new
discovery, of knowing something that would change my life. I expected it still to be there when I woke
up, and it was. I knew then how Newton must have felt when he finished writing the Principia. It seemed
to me that I had made a discovery of great scientific importance - a discovery of what science really
aimed at. The next question was: what could I do with it? How could I follow it up?
During the next few days, I did a great deal of thinking and writing, and I came to some important
conclusions. The most important of them was this: that although science may not have understood its real
aim, religion and poetry had always understood theirs. The mystics, like the poets, knew all about this
тАШbirdтАЩs eye consciousnessтАЩ that suddenly replaces our usual wormтАЩs eye view.