Stanisław Lem: Solaris

In the budding, growth, and spread of this living formation, in each of its movements separately and in all taken together, there was something one was tempted to call a cautious yet not timid naivety, as it strove frantically and rapidly to know, to take in, an unexpectedly encountered new shape. Then, in mid-journey, it had to withdraw when it was in danger of transgressing certain boundaries established by a mysterious law. This agile inquisitiveness was so utterly at odds with the immensity that stretched to every bright horizon. I had never before been so aware of its vast presence, its powerful, inexorable silence breathing evenly through its waves. Staring in wonderment, I was descending to regions of inertia that might have seemed inaccessible, and in the gathering intensity of engrossment I was becoming one with this fluid unseeing colossus, as if — without the slightest effort, without words, without a single thought — I was forgiving it for everything.

For the whole of the final week I behaved so sensibly that the distrustful glint in Snaut’s eye eventually stopped harassing me. On the outside I was calm; secretly, without being fully conscious of it, I was expecting something. What? Her return? How could I? Each of us is aware he’s a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws; it can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of love, which is more enduring than death, the finis vitae sed non amoris that has pursued us through the centuries, is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it’s simply futile. To be a clock, on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the cogs; to know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes increasingly comical through multiple repetitions? To replay human existence — fine, but to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune, pushing coins over and over into the jukebox? I didn’t believe for a minute that this liquid colossus, which had brought about the death of hundreds of humans within itself, with which my entire race had for decades been trying in vain to establish at least a thread of communication — that this ocean, lifting me up unwittingly like a speck of dust, could be moved by the tragedy of two human beings. But its actions were geared towards some purpose. True, even this I was not completely certain of. Yet to leave meant to strike out that perhaps slim, perhaps only imagined chance concealed in the future. And thus years amid furniture, objects, that we had both touched, in air that still remembered her breathing? In the name of what? The hope of her return? I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me — the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea, as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.

Zakopane, June 1959 — June 1960

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

Table of Contents

Newcomer

Solaricists

Guests

Sartorius

Harey

The Minor Apocrypha

Deliberations

Monsters

Liquid Oxygen

A Conversation

Thinkers

Dreams

Success

The Old Mimoid