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

madrigals were to be performed in a concert that would be broadcast by the BBC Third Programme.
Four of the boys were not interested but two of us joined. I sang a leading part in LassusтАЩs Missa vinum
bonum. and in BrittenтАЩs A Boy Is Born. After the concert, in the changing room, I was introduced to a
tall, clean shaven man with a face that reminded me of a picture of Thomas Carlyle that hung in our
school classroom. I was too excited to pay much attention to him or even to catch his name; but at
FranklinтАЩs house afterwards - where we had coffee and cakes - he came and sat beside me on the
settee, and began to question me about my interest in music. We soon discovered important common
ground; he thought Handel the greatest composer in the world, and so did I. Then the talk shifted, I
forget how, to the mathematics of infinite sets, and I was delighted to discover that he understood the
problems that Bertrand Russell discusses in the Principles of Mathematics. (I could never understand
how there could be any problem about the foundations of mathematics.)
It was one of those occasions that happen once in a lifetime: two minds with immediate and total
sympathy. He was forty-five, I was thirteen; but it was as if there was no age difference between us, as if
we had been close friends for twenty years. This is perhaps not as strange as it sounds. In my small-town
environment I had never met anyone who shared both my loves: science and music. Lyell already knew
about me; Franklin had talked about me at dinner a week before. Franklin was always intrigued by the
various books that I took to rehearsals - on mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology. Lyell was intrigued
by FranklinтАЩs description, so he came to the concert that night with the intention of talking to me.
Lyell left early, after inviting me to call and see him at Sneinton - a nearby village. When he had gone, I
asked Franklin: тАШWhat did you say his name was?тАЩ He told me it was Sir Alaistair Lyell, a descendent of
the Sir Charles Lyell whose Principles of Geology I had been reading only a week ago. I must admit
that I felt startled and shaken. I had never, in my whole life, actually talked to anyone with a title; in fact, I
donтАЩt think IтАЩd ever seen anyone with a title. I knew Sneinton; IтАЩd assumed Lyell lived in one of the
houses in the main street. When I learned that he lived in a sort of тАШmanorтАЩ surrounded by a park, I was
overawed. It was lucky that I had not caught the name when Franklin introduced him; I would have
stammered and blushed, or simply been tongue-tied. As it was, I lay awake half the night, trying to grasp
the fact that I had been talking to a тАШSirтАЩ, with no more respect or embarrassment than if he had been the
greengrocer.
Two days later, tense and shy, I cycled over to Sneinton. I found the place easily enough, a mile outside
the village, and it increased my misgivings: the high stone wall, the man in the gate lodge who rang the
house and then told me to go ahead up the drive. The house itself was less grand than I had expected,
but still too grand for me. And then Lyell himself came to answer the door, and the shyness vanished. The
curious sympathy, that remained unchanged to the end, was immediately there between us. I was
introduced to his wife - his first wife, Lady Sarah, who even at this time looked pale and ill - and then we
went immediately to his тАШmuseumтАЩ on the top floor.
The Lyell museum - now transferred into Nottingham - is too well known to need a description. At the
time I first saw it, it was less than half the size it later became; even so, it was enormous. Its chief exhibit,
then as now, was the skeleton of the Elasmotherium sibericum, the extinct ancestor of the rhinoceros,
whose horn grew in the middle of his forehead - undoubtedly the seed of the racial memory that became
the legendary unicorn. There was the mammoth tusk, and the skull of the sabre toothed tiger, and the
fragments of the plesiosaurus skeleton, which Lyell introduced to me as the Loch Ness monster. Sir
Charles LyellтАЩs rock collection was complete - and this was what fascinated me most on that first
afternoon. Lyell was, of course, the man who caused the first great intellectual revolution of the Victorian
era, before Darwin and Wallace and Tyndall and Huxley. Before Lyell, the old Biblical theory of creation
had held the field, qualified by CuvierтАЩs theory of violent catastrophes - periodic upheavals that destroyed
all life and made it necessary for God to re-populate the world with living creatures. According to Cuvier,
there were no less than four creations - which enabled him to explain the fossils of extinct creatures
without contradicting the Bible and Archbishop Usher. It was Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) who took
the incredible step of contradicting the Bible, and showing that living forms are continuous, and that the
time needed for their development amounts to millions of years. The uproar was enormous - to be