Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon [top rated books of all time .TXT] 📗
- Author: Olaf Stapledon
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It was not only physical effulgence that struck me down in that supreme
moment of my life. In that moment I guessed what mood it was of the
infinite spirit that had in fact made the cosmos, and constantly
supported it, watching its tortured growth. And it was that discovery
which felled me.
For I had been confronted not by welcoming and kindly love, but by a
very different spirit. And at once I knew that the Star Maker had made
me not to be his bride, nor yet his treasured child, but for some other
end.
It seemed to me that he gazed down on me from the height of his divinity
with the aloof though passionate attention of an artist judging his
finished work; calmly rejoicing in its achievement, but recognizing at
last the irrevocable flaws in its initial conception, and already
lusting for fresh creation.
His gaze anatomized me with calm skill, dismissing my imperfections, and
absorbing for his own enrichment all the little excellence that I had
won in the struggle of the ages.
In my agony I cried out against my ruthless maker. I cried out that,
after all, the creature was nobler than the creator; for the creature
loved and craved love, even from the star that was the Star Maker; but
the creator, the Star Maker, neither loved nor had need of love.
But no sooner had I, in my blinded misery, cried out, than I was struck
dumb with shame. For suddenly it was clear to me that virtue in the
creator is not the same as virtue in the creature. For the creator, if
he should love his creature, would be loving only a part of himself; but
the creature, praising the creator, praises an infinity beyond himself.
I saw that the virtue of the creature was to love and to worship, but
the virtue of the creator was to create, and to be the infinite, the
unrealizable and incomprehensible goal of worshipping creatures.
Once more, but in shame and adoration, I cried out to my maker. I said,
“It is enough, and far more than enough, to be the creature of so dread
and lovely a spirit, whose potency is infinite, whose nature passes the
comprehension even of a minded cosmos. It is enough to have been
created, to have embodied for a moment the infinite and tumultuously
creative spirit. It is infinitely more than enough to have been used, to
have been the rough sketch for some perfected creation.”
And so there came upon me a strange peace and a strange joy.
Looking into the future, I saw without sorrow, rather with quiet
interest, my own decline and fall. I saw the populations of the stellar
worlds use up more and more of their resources for the maintenance of
their frugal civilizations. So much of the interior matter of the stars
did they disintegrate, that their worlds were in danger of collapse.
Some worlds did indeed crash in fragments upon their hollow centers,
destroying the indwelling peoples. Most, before the critical point was
reached, were remade, patiently taken to pieces and rebuilt upon a
smaller scale. One by one, each star was turned into a world of merely
planetary size. Some were no bigger than the moon. The populations
themselves were reduced to a mere millionth of their original numbers,
maintaining within each little hollow grain a mere skeleton civilization
in conditions that became increasingly penurious.
Looking into the future aeons from the supreme moment of the cosmos, I
saw the populations still with all their strength maintaining the
essentials of their ancient culture, still living their personal lives
in zest and endless novelty of action, still practicing telepathic
intercourse between worlds, still telepathically sharing all that was of
value in their respective world-spirits, still supporting a truly
cosmical community with its single cosmical mind. I saw myself still
preserving, though with increasing difficulty, my lucid consciousness;
battling against the onset of drowsiness and senility, no longer in the
hope of winning through to any more glorious state than that which I had
already known, or of laying a less inadequate jewel of worship before
the Star Maker, but simply out of sheer hunger for experience, and out
of loyalty to the spirit.
But inevitably decay overtook me. World after world, battling with
increasing economic difficulties, was forced to reduce its population
below the numbers needed for the functioning of its own communal
mentality. Then, like a degenerating brain-center, it could no longer
fulfil its part in the cosmical experience.
Looking forward from my station in the supreme moment of the cosmos, I
saw myself, the cosmical mind, sink steadily toward death. But in this
my last aeon, when all my powers were waning, and the burden of my
decaying body pressed heavily on my enfeebled courage, an obscure memory
of past lucidity still consoled me. For confusedly I knew that even in
this my last, most piteous age I was still under the zestful though
remote gaze of the Star Maker.
Still probing the future, from the moment of my supreme unwithered
maturity, I saw my death, the final breaking of those telepathic
contacts on which my being depended. Thereafter the few surviving worlds
lived on in absolute isolation, and in that barbarian condition which
men call civilized. Then in world after world the basic skills of
material civilization began to fail; and in particular the techniques of
atomic disintegration and photosynthesis. World after world either
accidentally exploded its little remaining store of matter, and was
turned into a spreading, fading sphere of lightwaves in the immense
darkness; or else died miserably of starvation and cold. Presently
nothing was left in the whole cosmos but darkness and the dark whiffs of
dust that once were galaxies. Aeons incalculable passed. Little by
little each whiff of dust-grains contracted upon itself through the
gravitational influence of its parts; till at last, not without fiery
collisions between wandering grains, all the matter in each whiff was
concentrated to become a single lump. The pressure of the huge outer
regions heated the center of each lump to incandescence and even to
explosive activity. But little by little the last resources of the
cosmos were radiated away from the cooling lumps, and nothing was left
but rock and the inconceivably faint ripples of radiation that crept in
all directions throughout the ever “expanding” cosmos, far too slowly to
bridge the increasing gulfs between the islanded grains of rock.
Meanwhile, since each rocky sphere that had once been a galaxy had been
borne beyond every possible physical influence of its fellows, and there
were no minds to maintain telepathic contact between them, each was in
effect a wholly distinct universe. And since all change had ceased, the
proper time of each barren universe had also ceased.
Since this apparently was to be the static and eternal end, I withdrew
my fatigued attention back once more to the supreme moment which was in
fact my present, or rather my immediate past. And with the whole mature
power of my mind I tried to see more clearly what it was that had been
present to me in that immediate past. For in that instant when I had
seen the blazing star that was the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the
very eye of that splendor, strange vistas of being; as though in the
depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet
coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos.
THE MYTH OF CREATION
A WALKER in mountainous country, lost in mist, and groping from rock to
rock, may come suddenly out of the cloud to find himself on the very
brink of a precipice. Below he sees valleys and hills, plains, rivers,
and intricate cities, the sea with all its islands, and overhead the
sun. So I, in the supreme moment of my cosmical experience, emerged from
the mist of my finitude to be confronted by cosmos upon cosmos, and by
the light itself that not only illumines but gives life to all. Then
immediately the mist closed in upon me again.
That strange vision, inconceivable to any finite mind, even of cosmical
stature, I cannot possibly describe. I, the little human individual, am
now infinitely removed from it; and even to the cosmical mind itself it
was most baffling. Yet if I were to say nothing whatever of the content
of my adventure’s crowning moment, I should belie the spirit of the
whole. Though human language and even human thought itself are perhaps
in their very nature incapable of metaphysical truth, something I must
somehow contrive to express, even if only by metaphor.
All I can do is to record, as best I may with my poor human powers,
something of the vision’s strange and tumultuous after-effect upon my
own cosmical imagination when the intolerable lucidity had already
blinded me, and I gropingly strove to recollect what it was that had
appeared. For in my blindness the vision did evoke from my stricken mind
a fantastic reflex of itself, an echo, a symbol, a myth, a crazy dream
contemptibly crude and falsifying, yet, as I believe, not wholly without
significance. This poor myth, this mere parable, I shall recount, so far
as I can remember it in my merely human state. More I cannot do. But
even this I cannot properly accomplish. Not once, but many times, I have
written down an account of my dream, and then destroyed it, so
inadequate was it. With a sense of utter failure I stammeringly report
only a few of its more intelligible characters.
One feature of the actual vision my myth represented in a most
perplexing and inadequate manner. It declared that the supreme moment of
my experience as the cosmical mind actually comprised eternity within
it, and that within eternity there lay a multiplicity of temporal
sequences wholly distinct from one another. For though in eternity all
times are present, and the infinite spirit, being perfect, must comprise
in itself the full achievement of all possible creations, yet mis could
not be unless in its finite, its temporal and creative mode, the
infinite and absolute spirit conceived and executed the whole vast
series of creations. For creation’s sake the eternal and infinite spirit
entails time within its eternity, contains the whole protracted sequence
of creations.
In my dream, the Star Maker himself, as eternal and absolute spirit,
timelessly contemplated all his works; but also as the finite and
creative mode of the absolute spirit, he bodied forth his creations one
after the other in a time sequence proper to his own adventure and
growth. And further, each of his works, each cosmos, was itself gifted
with its own peculiar time, in such a manner that the whole sequence of
events within any single cosmos could be viewed by the Star Maker not
only from within the cosmical time itself but also externally, from the
time proper to his own life, with all the cosmical epochs coexisting
together. According to the strange dream or myth which took possession
of my mind, the Star Maker in his finite and creative mode was actually
a developing, an awakening spirit. That he should be so, and yet also
eternally perfect, is of course humanly inconceivable; but my mind,
overburdened with superhuman vision, found no other means of expressing
to itself the mystery of creation.
Eternally, so my dream declared to me, the Star Maker is perfect and
absolute; yet in the beginning of the time proper to his creative mode
he was an infant deity, restless, eager, mighty, but without clear will.
He was equipped with all creative power. He could make universes with
all kinds of physical and mental attributes. He was limited only by
logic.
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