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

THE QUEST OF THE ABSOLUTE


I was reading a book on music by Ralph Vaughan Williams the other day, while listening to a
gramophone record of his remarkable Fifth Symphony, when I came across the following remark: тАШI have
struggled all my life to conquer amateurish technique, and now that perhaps I have mastered it, it seems
too late to make any use of it.тАЩ I found myself moved almost to tears by the poignancy of those words of
a great musician. Admittedly, he was eighty-six when he died, but for practical purposes - the value of
the music he wrote in his last years - it might well have been twenty years earlier. And I found myself
thinking: Supposing by some fluke, Vaughan Williams had lived another twenty-five years... or supposing
he had been born a quarter of a century later. Could I have passed on to him what I now know, so that
he might still be alive and writing great music? The case of Shaw is even more to the point, for he came
close to the great discovery in Back to Methusakh, and in his early nineties, he remarked jokingly that he
was a proof of his own theory that men could live to be three hundred. Yet this is the man who said two
years later, as he lay in a hospital bed with a broken leg: тАШI want to die, and I canтАЩt, I canтАЩt,тАЩ He came so
close, but he was alone; and a man standing alone lacks that final ounce of conviction. Would Columbus
have had the courage to reach San Salvador Island if he had been alone on the Santa Maria?
It was this train of thought that decided me to tell the story of my discovery exactly as it happened. In
doing so, I break my own vow of secrecy; but I shall see that the account is withheld from those whom it
might harm - that is to say, from most of the human race. It should exist, even if it never leaves a bank
vault. The carbon copy of memory grows thinner year by year.


I was born in the Nottinghamshire village of Hucknall Torkard in 1942. My father was a maintenance
engineer in the colliery of Birkin Brothers. Those who have read D. H. Lawrence will recognise the
name; in fact, Lawrence was born fairly close by, at Eastwood. Byron is buried in the family vault at
Hucknall, and in my day, Newstead Abbey - his home - was still approached through a typical coal
mining village of grimy cottages. The setting sounds romantic; but dirt and boredom are not romantic; and
most of the memories of the first ten years of my life are of dirt and boredom. I think of falling rain, and
the smell of fish and chips on autumn nights, and queues outside the local cinema on Saturday evenings. I
was back there a few weeks ago, and found the place unrecognisable. It is now a suburb of Nottingham,
with an airport, an underground railway for commuters, and helicopter stations on the top of most blocks
of flats. Yet I cannot say I regret the change; I only have to read a few pages of The Rainbow to
remember how much I hated the place.
The great conflict of my childhood was between my love of science and my love of music. I was always a
good mathematician. My father gave me my first slide rule for Christmas when I was six. And, like most
mathematicians, I was almost dangerously susceptible to music. I can remember pausing outside the
church one evening, тАШclutching an armful of library books, and listening to the sound of the choir. They
were obviously rehearsing - probably some abomination by Wesley or Stainer - for they repeated the
same passage of half a dozen notes over and over again. The effect was almost incantatory, and in the
cold night air the voices sounded distant and mysterious, as if mourning for manтАЩs loneliness. Suddenly I
found myself crying, and before I could stop it, the feeling rushed over me like a burst dam. I hurried into
the churchyard and flung myself on the grass, where I could stifle my sobs, and allowed the feeling to
convulse me until I felt as though I were being shaken by the shoulders. It was a disturbing experience.
When I walked home - feeling relaxed and light-headed - I found it impossible to understand what had
happened to me.
Because I loved mathematics, and could do complicated sums in my head, my father decided that I
should be an engineer. The idea struck me as reasonable enough, although I found something oddly
boring about machinery. I felt the same when my father took me to visit the colliery, and showed me the