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

exceeded later only by the Darwinian controversy itself. I had read the story with excitement only a week
or so before I now saw the Lyell collection - the very fossils that had led him to his conclusions. Looking
around at this enormous room, with its skeletons and bones and rock specimens, I grasped for the first
time the reality of history. I can clearly remember this moment, as if it had happened ten minutes ago.
There was a touch of the feeling I had experienced playing the skolion: recognition that human life is small
and self-centred and totally divorced from reality, and that death is our final reckoning, the universeтАЩs
dismissal of our trivialities. And again, there was that curious core of happiness, the mindтАЩs delight in truth
at all costs, even if the truth is destructive. And I somehow grasped instinctively that there is no
contradiction between these two feelings, that the exultation is not some paradoxical acceptance of our
own destruction; that reality is synonymous with power.
That afternoon, I understood why Lyell and myself spoke as equals. I understood that our human time is
an illusion, and that the mind is capable of seeing through it. In that museum there was a тАШpoint of
intersection of the timeless with timeтАЩ, a moment outside time. And as I look back on it, I can see that I
possessed a total intuitive certainty that afternoon - a certainty that my life had reached a new phase, a
turning point.


In my dissatisfaction at the prospect of becoming an engineer, I had often daydreamed of the kind of life I
would prefer. I had no definite ideas, no clear alternatives; I only knew that I wanted to be allowed to
think and study as I liked. My favourite book was PeacockтАЩs Gryll Grange because I was fascinated by
the character of Mr Falconer, who is rich enough to live in a tower, surrounded by servant girls, and to
devote his life to browsing through a vast collection of books. (I was also charmed by the whole way of
life in Gryll Grange - leisurely conversations about ideas over enormous meals or during country walks.)
But even in my most epicurean daydreams I could not have anticipated a life as perfect as the one that I
led for the next five years. Lyell ate, drank and lived ideas. As I came to know him better, I understood
why I was as important to him as he was to me. He had never met anyone so totally committed to ideas
as he was. Even his fellow members of the Royal Society struck him as too blas├й, too worldly, too
comfortable in the futilities of everyday existence. They had allowed the world to dilute the intensity, the
original purity. His own teens had been lonely, for his fatherтАЩs chief interest had been in hunting and
fishing, while a younger brother had a practical turn that later led to his becoming a millionaire property
dealer. Now he imagined the satisfaction of meeting someone like his own younger self, someone through
whom he could rediscover the excitement of science and music, who had not outgrown his hunger for
ideas. So he was as happy to discover me as I to discover him; happier, perhaps, since he had formed a
mental picture of what he wanted, while I only experienced a formless dissatisfaction. He had never had
children - his first wife was sterile. All this meant that I came to a place that had been prepared for me.
Although there was no formal adoption, I became, for practical purposes, his adopted son. My parents
had no objection; from a very early stage - long before the thought entered my head - they entertained
the idea that he might make me his heir. This was, of course - pure wishful thinking and inexperience, not
shrewdness or intuition; still, they proved to be right, in the main.
At first, I spent part of the weekends there. During Easter, 1956, I travelled to America with him to
examine the Arizona meteor crater, near Winslow, and to collect specimens. (Five years later we were to
visit the scene of the Podkamennaya Tunguska explosion in Siberia, which, we established to our own
satisfaction, was an atomic explosion, probably of some space craft from another galaxy.) When we
returned from America, I transferred most of my books and other belongings from Hucknall to Sneinton
Hall, and thereafter spent more time there than at home. I continued at school to GCE level, after which
he offered to pay for my university training. He made no attempt to influence me, but I knew his own
views - that a university education is a waste of time, and that few of the first rate minds of the past
hundred years have owed anything to the university. (He was a (Cambridge man, but had left, at his own
request, in his second year, to pursue his own studies at home.) So I refused his offer. Besides, I knew
that he could teach me more than a dozen tutors. I never regretted this.