Disclaimer: I work in Google's Policy Team, developing multistakeholder cooperations for internet governance & policy themes, hence I want to point out that all the opinions and ruminations on this blog are mine, not Google's.


Sunday, December 02, 2007

metaphysical murder & Stanislaw Lem's reflection on love

The last words of Stanislaw Lem's psycho-analysis-thriller Solaris:

"We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that
finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox…

... I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past."


I have the german hörbuch and the enlish text as doc&html, just contact me.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I totally agree with the text. Only the step of the time gives quite a lot of experience to accept with resignation that the expectation of the love is the only thing that it sustains for us living and makes us feel humans, but why the subject of love has not changed in centuries during the literature? As long as there is love in the world there will be the loving passion in the literature.

We have to be enough wise NOT to pay attention of the reason and to PAY the heart attention, although we regret afterwards, the heart doesn’t mistakes because it feels and in the moment that it stops feeling is because it is operating the reason.

Do you agree Max?