Annotations ¶
I cannot for the life of me understand why, while people without driver’s licenses are not allowed on public roads, in bookstores one can find any number of books by persons without decency—let alone knowledge. The inflation of the printed word has been caused, no doubt, by the exponential increase in the number of those writing, but in equal degree by editorial policies. In the childhood of our civilization only select, well-educated individuals were able to read and write, and much the same criterion held after the invention of printing; and even if the works of imbeciles were published (which, I suppose, is impossible to avoid completely), their total number was not astronomical, as it is today. Today, in the flood of garbage, valuable publications must go under, because it is easier to find one worthwhile book among ten worthless than a thousand among a million. Moreover, the phenomenon of pseudo plagiarism becomes inevitable—the unintentional repetition of the ideas of others who are unknown.
Ants that encounter in their path a dead philosopher may make good use of him. If the example is shocking, I intend it to be. Literature, from the very beginning, has had a single enemy, and that is the restriction of the expressed idea. It turns out, however, that freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea, because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din? When that voice, though freely resounding, cannot be heard, because the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely?
Dr. Rappaport thought to himself that, just possibly, Swanson had not lied to the judge and had not copied, in a circle, one single tape, but had used sequentially the tapes that resulted from those many months of recording cosmic radiation. If the radiation was an intentional signaling, and if, in that period of time, one series of emissions of the “communication” concluded and then the transmission of the communication was resumed from the beginning, the result would be what Swanson swore to. The subsequent tapes would record the exact same series of impulses, which by their repetition would reveal that their noise aspect was only an illusion!
It is not hard to guess that filling the newspaper columns with items one more nonsensical than the next was nothing more or less than a diversionary tactic engineered by the skilled professionals of the CIA. Because to deny the business, and in the pages of the major publications at that, would have meant focusing attention on it in absolutely the most undesirable way. But to show that the thing was all delirium, to bury the grain of truth under an avalanche of imbecilic fictions—all attributed to “Professor” Laserowitz—was a clever move, particularly when the operation could be crowned with the insertion of a brief paragraph about the suicide of the madman, which, with its simple eloquence, completely laid to rest all rumors.
Secretly grieved (but this, I repeat, is my hypothesis) at his physical appearance as well as personality—he was a butterball and painfully timid—he assumed a manner that could be called circular irony. Everything he said, he said in quotes, with an artificial, exaggerated emphasis, and with the elocution of someone playing a succession of improvised, ad hoc roles. Therefore, whoever did not know him long and well was confounded, for it seemed impossible ever to tell what the man thought true and what false, and when he was speaking seriously and when he was merely amusing himself with words.
This ironic quote-unquote became at last a part of him, and enabled him to utter things that no one else would have been forgiven. He could even ridicule himself at any length, since this trick, in principle very simple, through consistent application rendered him quite impossible to pin down or catch. With humor, with self-irony, he built up around his person such a system of invisible fortifications that even those—like me—who had known him for years could not predict how he would react. I think that he strove particularly for this, and that the things he did, which sometimes indeed bordered on the clownish, he did with secret design, though they seemed perfectly spontaneous.
Autistic king
In love with history, rapt in history, Baloyne drove backward, as it were, into the time coming. For him modernity was a destroyer of values, and technology an instrument of the Devil. If I exaggerate, it is not by much. He was convinced that the culmination of humanity had already taken place, long ago, possibly in the Renaissance, and that a long, accelerating downhill career had begun.
This kind of rational husbandry, in Rappaport’s opinion, was what awaited the scientists; it was in fact already being put into practice in our own case. He made me this prediction in all seriousness. The wholesale dealer takes no interest in the inner life of the trained pig that runs about for the truffles; all that exists for him are the results of the pig’s activity, and it is no different between us and our authorities.
The rational husbandry of scientists admittedly has been hindered by relics of tradition, those unthinking sentiments that came out of the French Revolution, but there is reason to hope that this is a passing phase. Besides the well-equipped sties—that is to say, the shining laboratories—other installations should be provided, to deliver us from any possible feeling of frustration. For example, a science worker might satisfy his instincts of aggression in a hall filled with mannequins of generals and other high officials specially designed for beating; or he could go to specific spots for release of sexual energy, etc. Availing himself appropriately of outlets here and there, the scientist-pig—explained Rappaport—can then, without further distraction, devote himself to the hunting of truffles, for the benefit of the rulers but to the undoing of humanity, as indeed the new stage in history will demand of him.
Rappaport made no attempt to hide these views. It was amusing to observe the reactions of our colleagues to his pronouncements (not made at the official meetings, of course). The younger ones simply laughed, which angered Rappaport, because the truth was that he thought and spoke entirely in earnest. But there was no help for it: one’s personal experience in life is fundamentally unconveyable. Nontransmittable.
Rappaport did not forget—he grew aware of the presence of the sweetish corpse-smoke only when he observed the handkerchief in the hand of the officer he had singled out. He told himself that the moment he was shot, he would become that German.
It was dusk when the large gate was set ajar and, staggering in the cold evening air, the group of those left alive ran out into the empty street.
They dared not flee at first, but no one showed any interest in them. Why, Rappaport could not say. He did not attempt to analyze what the Germans did; they were like fate, which one did not have to explain.
“I understood it later,” he said, “thanks to other things. Although he spoke to us, you see, we were not people. He knew that we comprehended human speech but that nevertheless we were not human; he knew this quite well. Therefore, even if he had wanted to explain things to us, he could not have. The man could do with us what he liked, but he could not enter into negotiations, because for negotiation you must have a party in at least some respect equal to the party who initiates it, and in that yard there were only he and his men. A logical contradiction, yes, but he acted exactly according to that contradiction, and scrupulously. The simpler ones among his men did not possess this higher knowledge; the appearance of humanity given by our bodies, our two legs, faces, hands, eyes, that appearance deterred them a little from their duty; thus they had to butcher those bodies, to make them unlike people’s. But for him such primitive proceedings were no longer necessary. This sort of explanation is usually received metaphorically, as a kind of fable, but it is completely literal.”
Human as animal. Othering. Pigs from earlier.
But if the Pentagon believed results were directly proportional to the investment, that was that. The thought that our guardians were people who held that a problem that five experts were unable to solve could surely be taken care of by five thousand, was hair-raising.
Software projects
Had Grotius told me, in New Hampshire, that I would fly to a place in which every bathroom was bugged and every telephone tapped, had I been able to observe Eugene Albert Nye from that distance, I would not only have understood theoretically, but also sensed, felt, how all our freedoms could vanish the moment we produced what was expected of us.
Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality.
The armchair had controls for being raised, turned around, and lowered, no doubt so that between bouts of mental struggling one could take a little nap on it. Near it there was a large shape beneath a white cover. At first I took this for some piece of gymnastic equipment or a rocking horse (even that would not have surprised me), but it was a brand-new, very handsome IBM cryotronic calculator, which indeed proved useful to me. Wanting to join man more closely to the machine, the engineers at IBM had him work it also with his feet. Every time I pressed the “clear” pedal I expected, by reflex, to drive into the wall—the pedal was so much like a car accelerator. In the wall cabinet behind the desk I found a dictaphone, a typewriter, and also a small, scrupulously furnished bar.
The bedroom was also done up nicely. In it I found an electric heating pad, a medicine chest, and a small hearing aid. To this day I do not know whether this was a joke or a mistake. Taken together, everything expressed the careful execution of the order: “Top quarters for a top mathematician.” Glancing at the night table, I saw a Bible and was reassured—yes, they truly had my welfare at heart.
Taking possession of this new abode, I put on my thinking cap. I reasoned more or less as follows: Civilization is a thing both necessary and accidental; like the lining of a nest, it is a shelter from the world, a tiny counterworld that the large world silently tolerates, with the toleration of indifference, because in it there is no answer to the questions of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, laws and customs. Language, the creation of civilization, is like the framework of the nest; it binds all the bits of lining and unites them into the shape that is deemed necessary by the occupants of the nest. Language is an appeal to the joint identity of the nesting beings, their common denominator, their constant of similarity, and therefore its influence must end immediately beyond the edge of that subtle structure.
Ted Chiang
If we lived a billion times more slowly, and correspondingly longer, if a second—in this fancy—equaled an entire century, we would certainly conclude that the continents of the globe were processes, seeing with our own eyes how changeable they were, for they would be moving before us no less than waterfalls do, or ocean currents. And if, on the other hand, we lived a billion times faster, we would conclude that the waterfall was an object—because it would present itself to us as something highly immobile and immutable. The difference between “object” and “process,” therefore, gave no need for concern. It was now only necessary to prove, and not merely to speculate, that the “letter” was a “ring,” just as the molecular model of benzene is a ring. If I did not wish to send a two-dimensional image of that molecule, but chose, rather, to code it into some linear form, a series of successive signals, the place in the benzene ring from which I would begin my description would be unimportant. Every place would serve equally well.
For two Mohammedans, the same small “fragments” of the Gospel are “true”—as opposed to all the rest of it. If people’s preprogramming is identical, the results of their investigations may coincide, even though they have not consulted each other.
Letter as messsge fromg God
The neutrino stream by which the letter reached us was too attenuated for the effect to have been discovered directly. Only its concentration by many hundreds of millions of times allowed the effect to be observed—in solutions, moreover, that had been irradiated for weeks on end. Even so, this suggested strongly that the emission, when not intensified, still had the same “life-favoring” property, except that the property would manifest itself in periods measured not in weeks but in hundreds of thousands—no, in millions—of years. Back in the prehistoric past, that all-penetrating precipitation increased the chances, in however fractional a way, of life forming in the oceans, because it wrapped certain types of organic molecules, as it were, in an invisible armor that made them resistant to the chaotic bombardment of Brownian motion. The stellar signal did not itself create life, but assisted in life’s earliest, most elementary stage, hindering the dissolution of what had become combined.
Life on Earth due to the signal
Not for a minute did I put stock in any of the conjectures about the signal. The telegraphed individual, the blueprint of the “great brain,” of the plasmic “informational machine,” of the synthetic “ruler” who was to conquer Earth—all this was borrowed from the poverty-stricken repertoire of ideas which civilization, in its current technological form, had at its disposal. These imaginings were a reflection—much like the themes of science-fiction novels—of society, and of society primarily in its American version, whose export outside the States prospered around the middle of the century. They were either fashionable novelties or else conceptions built on the game principle “it’s them or us”—and never did the insipidity of invention, its enchainment to Earth in the narrow channel of historical time, appear more obvious to me than when I heard these theories, seemingly bold but in reality pathetically naïve.
Perhaps it is a Revelation,” I replied. “Holy Scripture need not be printed on paper and bound in gold-embossed cloth. It can be also a plasmatic glob . . . such as Frog Eggs.”
Was it possible to believe that the purely physical, life-giving aspect of the signal was completely independent of, totally divorced from, its content? That the signal should represent no information at all, no “sense” beyond its “protective” relation to life, was impossible—Frog Eggs, if nothing else, gave proof of that. Then could it be that the content was in some way parallel to what its medium effected? I knew that I was getting onto slippery ground. The notion of the code as a message which by its content as well was to “make happy,” “do good,” immediately suggested itself. And yet, as Voltaire put it, when the grain is shipped to the Sultan, does the Captain concern himself about the comfort of the mice on board?
Rappaport, my neighbor, and we talked sometimes for hours. About the stellar code itself we spoke rarely and said little. One day I found him amid large packages from which spilled attractive, glossy paperbacks with mythical covers. He had tried to use, as a “generator of ideas”—for we were running out of them—those works of fantastic literature, that popular genre (especially in the States), called, by a persistent misconception, “science fiction.” He had not read such books before; he was annoyed—indignant, even—expecting variety, finding monotony. “They have everything except fantasy,” he said. Indeed, a mistake. The authors of these pseudo-scientific fairy tales supply the public with what it wants: truisms, cliches, stereotypes, all sufficiently costumed and made “wonderful” so that the reader may sink into a safe state of surprise and at the same time not be jostled out of his philosophy of life. If there is progress in a culture, the progress is above all conceptual, but literature, the science-fiction variety in particular, has nothing to do with that.
Rappaport was a bit of a “thermodynamic psychoanalyst”; he declared, for instance, that really all the basic drives providing the motive force for human action could be derived directly from physics—but physics in the broadest sense of the word.
The urge to destruction is deducible from thermodynamics. Life is a fraud, an attempt at embezzlement, seeking to circumvent laws otherwise inevitable and implacable; insulated from the rest of the world, it immediately enters the path of decay, and that inclined plane leads to the normal state of matter, to the permanent equilibrium that is death. In order to continue living, life must feed on order, but because there is no order—none highly organized—other than life, it is condemned to consume itself. It must destroy to live, must take its nourishment from systems that are nourishment only to the extent that they can be ruined. Not ethics but physics determines this law.
I pointed out to him that by that argument he was universalizing bisexuality, making it a constant in the Cosmos. He only smiled; he never answered directly. In another age, another era, he would have been, I am certain, a stern mystic, a builder of systems; in our era made sober by an overabundance of discoveries, which tore apart like shrapnel every systemic coherence, an era which both accelerated progress as never before and was sick to death of progress, he was only a commentator and an analyst.
Sometimes a person who is valued, respected, even loved by all, cares most, in the innermost recess of his soul, about the opinion of someone who stands uninterested outside the circle of admirers, and who may be, in the eyes of the world, of no particular importance, a mediocrity.
Not one of the modern governments had sufficient power, or sufficient authority, for that. It would have meant doing battle with the mightiest of human drives, and with the majority of churches, and with the very foundation of the rights of man, hallowed by tradition. On the other hand, after an atomic cataclysm the strict state control of marriage and childbearing would be an immediate and vital necessity, for otherwise the genetic plasm damaged by the radiation would give rise to an endless number of monsters. This emergency control could then be replaced gradually by a legal system administering the propagation of the species, beneficially guiding its evolution and numerical force.
Not so much to amass still more knowledge as first to invalidate its vast deposits in those areas where less important and therefore superfluous information lies—that seems to me to be the first duty of contemporary science. The technologies of information have created, supposedly, a paradise in which anyone who desires to can know everything; but this is a complete fiction. Selection, tantamount to resignation, is as unavoidable as breathing.
If humanity were not being constantly goaded, provoked, and kindled by the local mutual gnawings of nationalisms, by collisions of interests (often more apparent than real), by surfeits concentrated at certain points on the globe alongside concentrations of want (yet surely by now we have the capability, in principle at least, among all our technological arts, of resolving such contradictions)—humanity, perhaps, might finally realize the extent to which these small, bloody fireworks, operated at a distance by the nuclear capital of the Superpowers, blind it to what meanwhile is taking place “by itself,” what runs loose and is under no control. Politics views the globe exactly as it did in the preceding centuries (but now translunar space is included)—as a chessboard for contests. But all along, that board has been surreptitiously changing; it is no more a stationary ground, a foundation, but a raft, afloat and splintering under the blows of unseen currents that are carrying it in a direction in which no one has been looking.
But, yes, futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Hermann Kahn made Cassandra’s profession “scientific,” yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable. The search for the ultimate weapon has turned scientists into seekers of a philosophers’ stone that differs from the alchemists’ dream in one respect only, that it definitely exists. The reader of futurological papers has before him graphs and tables printed on glossy paper and informing him as to when hydrogen-helium reactors will appear and when the telepathic property of the mind will be harnessed for commercial use. Such future discoveries are foreseen with the aid of mass pollings of the appropriate specialists—a dangerous precedent, in that it creates the fiction of knowledge where formerly it was generally conceded that there was complete—but complete—ignorance.
It’s only gotten worse
Every sentence in a book means something, even when pulled out of context; but within that context it mingles with the meanings of other sentences, of those that precede it and of those that follow. From such permeation, accretion, and focal fusion emerges finally the idea, frozen in time, that is the work
Art criticism. Decoding the message
I remember how once I was being driven by a famous philosopher who admitted to solipsism, and he got a flat tire. Interrupting his discourse on the phantasmagoria of illusion which is all existence, he set about—in the most ordinary way, even with grunts—jacking up the car and hauling out the spare. I looked on with childish delight, as if seeing Jesus Christ with a stuffed nose. Using the illusion of a wrench, he removed, one by one, the nonexistent nuts, then looked with despair at his hands covered with grease; the grease had no more substance than a dream, according to his doctrine—but somehow that did not enter his head.
The atoms, in the course of their disintegration, jump through the shield?” I asked.
“No. They simply disappear in one place and reappear in another.” “But that violates the principle of conservation!” “Not necessarily, because they do this very quickly—something flies in here, something flies out there, you see. The balance remains unchanged. And do you know what transports them in this miraculous fashion? A neutrino field. And one modulated, moreover, by the original emission—a kind of ‘divine wind.’”
Nuclear reactors always limped behind the production of bombs; we had hydrogen warheads but still no hydrogen piles; the entire microworld revealed to man its interior—distorted by that one-sided approach—and therefore we knew far more about the strong interactions than about the weak. I discussed these topics with Donald; he did not agree with me, being of the opinion that if anyone should “shoulder the blame” for the “one-sidedness of physics” (though he did not believe in that one-sidedness, either), it was not we, but the world, by virtue of its structure. The simple fact was that it was easier, from any objective standpoint—easier if only by the law of least resistance—to destroy than it was to create. Destruction was a gradient consistent with the main direction of processes in the Universe, whereas creation always had to go against the current.
This whole stream of technological pressures threatened to cleave the biological homogeneity of the species, hitherto intact. It was not just a single civilization for all men that such changes could render a fossil from the dead past, but even the single, universal physical shape of man. Man might in effect transform his society into a psychozoic type of ant colony.
because the overwhelming majority of the material products of the mind were channeled into sybaritic pursuits. An ingeniously constructed television set dispersed intellectual garbage; sophisticated transportation technologies made it possible for a degenerate, instead of getting soused in his own backyard, to dress up as a tourist and do the same in the vicinity of Saint Peter’s basilica. If this tendency were to lead to the invasion of the human body by technological contrivances, undoubtedly the idea would be to expand the gamut of pleasurable sensations to the maximum, and perhaps even to bring into being—besides sex, narcotics, culinary happiness—other, as yet unknown, kinds of sensual stimulation and gratification.
If we had, in the brain, a “pleasure center,” then what prevented us from connecting to it synthetic sense organs that would allow the reaching of orgasms mystical and nonmystical, through actions specially designed and devised as triggers of multiphase ecstasy? The carrying out of such an auto-evolution would constitute a definitive closure in the culture and mores; it would entail a withdrawal from all things extraterrestrial. It would be an exceptionally pleasant form of intellectual suicide.
Thus, in this spirited picture, the stellar code was revealed to be a transmission sent into the sphere of our Universe—from the Universe that came before it. The Senders, therefore, had not existed for at least thirty billion years. They fashioned the “message” so well that it survived the annihilation of their Cosmos; and their message, joining the processes of the succeeding creation, set in motion the evolution of life on the planets. We, too, were Their children . . .
An ingenious notion! The “signal” was no letter at all; its “life-giving” virtue did not represent one “aspect” as opposed to the “content.” It was only that we, according to our custom, had sought to separate what could not be separated. The signal—or, rather, the causal pulse—began first with a “tuning” of the cosmic material, newly resurrected, in order that there would arise particles with the desired properties (desired from the point of view of that civilization, of course), and when astrogenesis had got under way, and with it planetogenesis, other structural features became “activated,” features present at the beginning within the pulse but till now having no “addressee”; only then did they begin to manifest their ability to assist the birth of life. And since it was “easier” to increase the overall chance of survival for large molecules than to direct and govern the formation of the most elementary building blocks of matter, we discovered the first effect as separate and “nonsemantic,” while giving to the second, the atom-creative part, the name of “letter.”
When Sylvester finished, there was much consternation. Here was an embarras de richesses! The signal either was a natural phenomenon, a “last chord” of a dying Universe, hammered out by a “fissure” between world and antiworld onto a neutrino wave; a deathbed kiss planted upon the front of the wave—or else it was the last will and testament of a civilization that no longer lived. An impressive choice!
As long as we believed that we had received a letter, however incomprehensible it was, however mysterious, the knowledge of the existence of a Sender had value in itself. But now, when it turned out that perhaps the thing was not a letter but a meaningless scrawl, nothing remained to us except the sand . . . and even if the sand was gold dust, we felt reduced to poverty—more, we felt robbed.
Not atoms, not galaxies, and neither planets nor our own bodies has Anyone cordoned off with such a system of safeguards, and we bear all the dismal consequences of that Neglect. Science is the part of culture that rubs against the world. We scrabble out pieces from the world and consume them—not in the order that would be best for us, because No One was so kind as to arrange this, but in an order that is regulated only by the resistance that matter itself presents. The atoms and stars have no reasons; they cannot defy us when we fashion models in their image; they will not bar our way to knowledge that may possibly be lethal. Whatever exists outside man is like a corpse: it can possess no intention. But the moment the forces not of Nature but of Reason direct a message at us, the situation changes completely. The One who sent out the letter was motivated by a purpose that was definitely not indifferent to life.
Circling back to this ide of the world being indferrent to us
The Metagalaxy is a limitless throng of psychozoic enclaves. Civilizations deviating from ours by a certain number of degrees, but, like ours, divided, mired in internal quarrels, burning their resources in fratricidal struggles, have for millennia been making—and still are making, again and again—readings of the code, readings as unsuccessful as our own. Just like us, they attempt to fashion the strange fragments that emerge from their efforts into a weapon—and, just like us, they fail. When did the conviction take root in me that this was the case? It is hard to say.
He who wields the imagination shall perish in the imagination. And yet imagination is supposed to be an open window on the world.
Screed against solopsism earlier in book
I did not accept this knowledge without a fight; it was too much at odds with all that I had grown accustomed to. I saw, at the same time, our undertaking: the throng of scientists overseen discreetly by the government of which I was a citizen. Wrapped in a network of bugs and taps, we were supposed to establish contact with an intelligence that inhabited the Cosmos. In reality this was a stake in an ongoing global game; it became part of the pot, entered the pleiad of countless cryptonym-acronyms that filled the concrete bowels of the Pentagon; it was placed in some vault, on some shelf, in some file, with the stamp of TOP SECRET on the folder; yet another Operation, with the letters HMV, doomed in the bud, as it were, to insanity—this attempt to hide and imprison a thing that had been filling the abyss of the Universe for millions of years, in order to extract, as from lemon pits, information packed with fatal power.
If this was not madness, there is not and never will be madness. And so: the Senders had in mind certain beings, certain civilizations, but not all, not even all those of the technological circle. What sort of civilizations are the proper addressees? I do not know. I will say only this: if, in the opinion of the Senders, that information is not fitting for us to learn, then we will not learn it. I place great confidence in Them—because They did not let me down. And yet, could not the whole thing have been only a series of coincidences? Absolutely. Was not the neutrino code itself discovered by accident? And could not the code in turn have arisen by accident, and by accident impeded the decomposition of large organic molecules, and by accident repeated itself, and, finally, by sheer chance produced Lord of the Flies? That is all possible. Accident can also cause such a swirling of waves at high tide that when the water recedes there will appear, on the smooth sand, the deep print of a foot.
Skepticism is like a microscope whose magnification is constantly increased: the sharp image that one begins with finally dissolves, because it is not possible to see ultimate things: their existence is only to be inferred.
Over the code, now published, anyone from the legion of loose screws can rack his brains—those who used to invent perpetual-motion machines and trisect angles—and, in general, anyone can believe what he wants to believe. Particularly if his belief, like mine, has no practical consequence. Because it did not, after all, reduce me to dust and ashes. I am as I was before entering the Project. Nothing has changed.
I would like to conclude with a few words about the people of the Project. I already mentioned that my friend Donald is not alive. He suffered a statistical deviation in the stream of cellular divisions: cancer. Yvor Baloyne is not simply a professor and a dean, but a man so overworked that he does not even know how happy he is. About Dr. Rappaport I know nothing. The letter that I sent several years ago to the Institute for Advanced Study was returned. Dill is in Canada—neither of us has time to correspond.
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. Then star nor sun shall waken, Nor any change of light: Nor sound of waters shaken, Nor any sound or sight: Nor wintry leaves nor vernal, Nor days nor things diurnal; Only the sleep eternal In an eternal night. Zakopane, June 1967 Kraków, December 1967
What do I know of the secret fears, ideas, and hopes of those who were my colleagues for a time? I was never able to conquer the distance between persons. An animal is fixed to its here-and-now by the senses, but man manages to detach himself, to remember, to sympathize with others, to visualize their states of mind and feelings: this, fortunately, is not true. In such attempts at pseudo merging and transferral we are only able, imperfectly, darkly, to visualize ourselves. What would happen to us if we could truly sympathize with others, feel with them, suffer for them? The fact that human anguish, fear, and suffering melt away with the death of the individual, that nothing remains of the ascents, the declines, the orgasms, and the agonies, is a praiseworthy gift of evolution, which made us like the animals. If from every unfortunate, from every victim, there remained even a single atom of his feelings, if thus grew the inheritance of the generations, if even a spark could pass from man to man, the world would be full of raw, bowel-torn howling.
We are like snails, each stuck to his own leaf. I retreat behind the shield of my mathematics, and recite, when that does not suffice, these final lines from Swinburne’s poem:
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