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

mechanisms that it was his duty to maintain. It struck me as futile to spend oneтАЩs life keeping a mass, of
dead metal up to a certain level of efficiency. What did it matter? But I could think of no good reason to
object to my fatherтАЩs plans. I spent most of my spare time playing the airs of Dowland and Campion on a
recorder, and learning to pick out tunes from The Messiah on the electric organ that belonged to a
neighbour. Certainly, there was nothing in music that seemed to offer a real alterative to engineering; I
would never be more than a mediocre executant.
I can remember clearly the time when the problem of death first struck me. I had borrowed a book on
early music from the library. That cold, modal music of the Middle Ages continued to exert its strange
attraction over me. In the chapter on ancient Greek music, I discovered the Skolion of Seikilos, with its
words:
May lifeтАЩs sun upon thee smile
Far from pain and sorrow.
Life is far too short, alas.
Death the kraken waits to drown you
In the sea of earth.

I knew about the kraken, the legendary giant octopus; so, apparently, did Homer. (I presume Scylla is
supposed to be an octopus.) The lines made me feel cold. All the same, I went up to our attic and tried
out the skolion on our old piano, picking out the Phrygian scale, then playing it through until I understood
the shape of the melody. Again, the coldness settled on me, and I murmured the words aloud as I played,
feeling the same immense sadness, the sensation of infinite distances, that I had experienced in the
churchyard. Suddenly, my mind said: What are you doing, you fool? This is real, not a literary metaphor.
There is not a person alive in the world today who will still be alive in a hundred years from now... And I
grasped the reality, the truth of my own death. The horror almost choked me. I felt too weak to keep my
hands on the keyboard, too weak to sit on the piano stool without support. Then, for the first time, I
understood why the idea of engineering struck me as pointless. It was wasting time. Time. It was
disconnected from reality. Like opening and closing your mouth without speaking. Irrelevant. The watch
on my wrist ticked like a time bomb, presenting lifeтАЩs ultimatum. And what was I doing? I was learning to
maintain the machinery at BirkinтАЩs colliery. I knew that I could never be an engineer. But what could I be
instead? What would not be irrelevant?
The strange thing is that the experience was not all horror. Somewhere deep inside me there was a spark
of happiness. To see the emptiness of things brings its own exultancy. Perhaps because to grasp futility is
to recognise that its opposite is implied. I had no idea of the meaning of this тАШoppositeтАЩ. I only knew that
the skolion of Seikilos was somehow preferable to mathematics, because it recognised a problem that
could not be formulated mathematically. The effect was to weaken my interest in science and to deepen
my love of music and poetry. But the conflict remained hidden, and within a day or so, I had forgotten it.


I owe the profoundest debt of my life to Sir Alastair Lyell - of whom I have written at length elsewhere
(Introduction to Sir Alastair Lyell, A Life in Science by Leslie M Banyon, Lord & Fisher, London
1972). I met him in the December of 1955, when I was thirteen; from that time, until his death twelve
years later, he was closer to me than any other human being, including my father and mother.
In the autumn of 1955, I became a temporary member of the St ThomasтАЩs church choir. It was a Church
of England choir, and my family, insofar as they possessed any religion at all were Methodists; but I had
been asked to sing by the choirmaster, McEwan Franklin, who was well known in Nottingham musical
circles. At this time I possessed a clear soprano voice (that remained unbroken until I was sixteen), and I
belonged to a group of half a dozen boys who often sang in the school chapel. Franklin heard us at an
end of term concert in July of that year, and we were all asked whether we would be willing to join the St
ThomasтАЩs choir for its winter concert season. Franklin had scheduled an ambitious season that included
Judas Maccabaeus, motets of Lassus, madrigals by Gesualdo, and some Britten pieces. The motets and