5

Удивительный рассказ, в некотором роде предвосхитивший эпохальные антиутопии Замятина, Хаксли и Оруэлла. Не только и не просто ответ утопиям, основанным на технологическем прогрессе, а короткое исследование человеческой природы, его взаимоотношений с окружающим миром, с религией, верой, свободой; исследование места человека в социуме, творческой производительности, индивидуальности. Удивительно, сколько вмещает в себя этот короткий рассказ, сколько мыслей рождает. И как он на нескольких страницах показывает нам, людям виртуального века, мир - уже сегодняшний, а не завтрашний. Хотелось бы надеяться, что человечество выучит урок менее радикальными способами.

They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with the colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as it was a garment and no more, so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body—it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend—glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.