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

Perhaps it is not entirely relevant to my story, but I cannot resist trying to give a picture of my life at
Sneinton in those early years. It was a warm, comfortable house, and the servantsтАЩ quarters were so
enormous that I often lost my way in them during the first months. I particularly liked the windows of the
two front rooms, which stretched from floor to ceiling. There was a hill opposite, with trees along the
skyline; its sunsets could be magnificent. Lady Sarah loved to sit in the writing room in the afternoons,
and make toast at an open fireplace - I think she liked the smell - and drink as many as ten cups of tea.
Lyell and I usually came down from the laboratory to join her. (I refer to him here as Lyell although, like
his wife, I always called him Alec; to the rest of his family he was Alastair. An amusing touch - the
gardener-chauffeur called him Jamie. He was one тАШof the most naturally democratic persons I have ever
known.) After dinner, we usually moved into the music room to play gramophone records, or sometimes,
to make music for ourselves. (He played the clarinet and oboe, as well as the piano; I was also a
passable clarinettist.) His collection of records - mostly 78тАЩs - was enormous, and occupied a whole
wall, stretching from floor to ceiling. Sir Compton Mackenzie, who once spent a weekend in the house
when I was there, said that Lyell probably owned the largest record library in the country after The
Gramophone. I should mention here one of LyellтАЩs amusing idiosyncrasies; he seemed to enjoy very long
works for their own sake. I think he simply enjoyed the intellectual discipline of concentrating for hours at
a time. If a work was long, it automatically recommended itself to him. So we have spent whole evenings
listening to the complete Contest Between Harmony and Invention of Vivaldi, the complete Well
Tempered Clavier, whole operas of Wagner, the last five quartets of Beethoven, symphonies of
Bruckner and Mahler, the first fourteen Haydn symphonies... He even had a strange preference for a
sprawling, meandering symphony by Furtwangler, simply because it ran on for two hours or so.
My own enthusiasm and interest was obviously important to him. If I became tired or indifferent, I could
immediately sense his disappointment. When his wife once protested at the number of hours he kept me
working or listening to music, he said: тАШNonsense. Man is naturally a creature of the mind. The idea that
brain-work tires people is an old wivesтАЩ tale. Man should no more get tired of using his brain - if he is
using it properly - than a fish should get tired of water.тАЩ
Lyell was, of course, an eclectic. He loved to quote a sentence that Yeats attributes to Pater - when
Pater was explaining the presence of volumes of political economy on his bookshelves: тАШEverything that
has occupied man for any length of time is worthy of our study.тАЩ He was passionately opposed to the
idea of the specialist in any field - certainly in science or mathematics. When I first knew him, his chief
reputation was as a micro-biologist. He was the first man to cultivate rickettsiae тАФ intracellular parasites
of microscopic size - apart from a living host. His essay on mastigophora - a unicellular animal - is a
classic that has been reprinted in many anthologies of scientific literature, and his paper on yeast
infections, although less deliberately тАШliteraryтАЩ, is also a classic of its kind. But he refused to be тАШtypedтАЩ as
a scientist, and I once heard Sir Julian Huxley refer jokingly to Sneinton Hall as тАШthe laboratory of a
mediaeval alchemistтАЩ. After 1952 he was fascinated - one might almost say obsessed - by the problem of
the expansion of the universe and quasi-stellar radio sources, and his observatory was one of the
best-equipped private observatories in the country, perhaps in Europe. (Its 80-inch reflecting telescope is
now in my own observatory near Mentone.) In 1957, his interest moved decisively to the field of
molecular biology and problems of genetics. He also experienced a revival of an early interest in number
theory - this was a matter in which I exerted an influence -and in the question of how far electronic
calculating machines could solve previously insoluble problems.
It may seem incredible to most readers that a man with such a variety of interests should also have time
for music - as well as for literature, painting and philosophy. Such a view misses the point. Lyell felt that
most men - even brilliant men - waste their intellectual resources. He liked to point out that Sir William
Rowan Hamilton could speak a dozen languages - including Persian - at the age of nine, and that John
Stuart Mill had read all the Dialogues of Plato - in Greek - when he was seven. тАШBoth these men were
intellectual failures if we judge their mature achievement by their earlier standards,тАЩ he wrote in a letter to
me. He believed that our limitations are due mainly to laziness, ignorance and timidity.