Theos-Talk Archives (November 2006 Message tt00950)

Fiction, Stapledon


  Below is John's list of Olaf Stabledon's 
books (which disappeared from the previous 
post) and also a few paragraphs from his 
"Starmaker" which I think is a great piece 
of writing.


    A lot of truths can be expressed in 
fiction that can't be expressed in non-fiction, 
and it might be called the voice of the 
soul, rather than of the mind, like non-fiction.  
Blavatsky and Judge used fiction, like 
Blavatsky's "Nightmare tales" and Judge's 
short stories, or like Dostoevsky's "The 
Grand Inquisitor" which her teacher told 
her to translate.


    I read recently Cormac McCarthy's 
"The Road," which is about a man and his 
son in a post-apocalyptic world, walking 
the interstates in a desolate world.  It's 
sort in the same scheme as the "Terminator" 
movies, and other sci-fi, and one wonders 
where people get the all-too-realistic 
ideas for this type of literature.  Maybe 
it is something in the memory of the 
soul, and the fall of civilization that 
we have all gone through before, like 
the Atlantis legend, and maybe many 
times before.


                        - jake j.


Olaf Stapledon was somewhat of a visionary 
of his time, he wrote then about our present 
situation of Oil and demand supply shrinkage. 
I recommend his books;

<Sirius.... 1944 Penguin Books Paperback
<Star Maker ...... 1937   "      " 
<The Last and First Men .... 1930   " 
<The Last Men in London .... 1932   "
<Odd  John .... 1935 
<A Man Divided ....... 1950 
<A Modern Theory of Ethics .... 1935?

John



"THE EARTH"


   ... One night when I had tasted bitterness 
I went out on to the hill. Dark heather 
checked my feet. Below marched the suburban 
street lamps. Windows, their curtains drawn, 
were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives 
of dreams. Beyond the seas's level darkness 
a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead, obscurity.
        

I distinguished our own house, our islet 
in the tumultuous and bitter currents of 
the world. There, for a decade and a half, 
we two, so different in quality, had grown 
in and in to one another, for mutual 
support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. 
There daily we planned our several undertakings, 
and recounted the day's oddities and vexations. 
There letters piled up to be answered, socks 
to be darned. There the children were born, 
those sudden new lives. There, under that 
roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant 
sometimes to one another, were all the while 
thankfully one, one larger, more conscious 
life than either alone.
        

All this, surely, was good. Yet there 
was bitterness. And bitterness not only 
invaded us from the world; it welled up 
also within our own magic circle. For horror 
at our futility, at our own unreality, and 
not only at the world's delirium, had 
driven me out on to the hill.
          

 We were always hurrying from one little 
urgent task to another, but the upshot was 
unsubstantial. Had we, perhaps, misconceived 
our whole existence? Were we, as it were, 
living from false premises? And in particular, 
this partnership of ours, this seemingly so 
well-based fulcrum for activity in the world, 
was it after all nothing but a little eddy 
of complacent and ingrown domesticity, 
ineffectively whirling on the surface of 
the great flux, having in itself no depth 
of being, and no significance? Had we 
perhaps after all deceived ourselves? Behind 
those rapt windows did we, like so many 
others, indeed live only a dream? In a sick 
world even the hale are sick. And we two, 
spinning our little life mostly by rote, 
seldom with clear cognizance, seldom with 
firm intent, were products of a sick world.
         

Yet this life of our was not all sheer 
and barren fantasy. Was it not spun from 
the actual fibres of reality, which we 
gathered in with all the comings and goings 
through our door, all our traffic with 
the suburb and the city and with remoter 
cities, and with the ends of the earth? 
And were we not spinning together an 
authentic expression of our own nature? 
Did not our life issue daily as more or 
less firm threads of active living and 
mesh itself into the growing web, the 
intricate, ever-proliferating pattern of 
mankind?
       

I considered "us" with quiet interest 
and a kind of amused awe. How could I 
describe our relationship even to myself 
without either disparaging it or insulting 
it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality? 
For this our delicate balance of dependence 
and independence, this coolly critical, 
shrewdly ridiculing, but loving mutual 
contact, was surely a microcosm of true 
community, was after all in its simple 
style an actual and living example of that 
high goal which the world seeks.
         

The whole world? The whole universe? 
Overheard, obscurity unveiled a star. One 
tremulous arrow of light, projected how 
many thousands of years ago, now stung 
my nerves with vision, and my heart with 
fear. For in such a universe as this 
what significance could there be in our 
fortuitous, our frail, our evanescent community?
        

But now irrationally I was seized with a 
strange worship, not, surely of the star, 
that mere furnace which mere distance 
falsely sanctified, but of something other, 
which the dire contrast of the star and 
us signified to the heart. Yet what, what 
could thus be signified? Intellect, peering 
beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker, 
but only darkness; no Love, no Power even, 
but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.
    

  - Olaf Stapledon  [From Starmaker]

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