Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon (bts book recommendations .txt) 📕

must come in another way. The planet’s own orbit, fatally contracting,

must bring every world at last so close to its sun that conditions must

pass beyond the limit of life’s adaptability, and age by age all living

things must be parched to death and roasted.

Dismay, terror, horror many a time seized us as we witnessed these huge

disasters. An agony of pity for the last survivors of these worlds was

part of our schooling.

The most developed of the slaughtered worlds did not need our pity,

since their inhabitants seemed capable of meeting the end of all that

they cherished with peace, even a strange unshakable joy which we in

this early stage of our adventure could by no means comprehend. But only

a few, very few, could reach this state. And only a few out of the great

host of worlds could win through even to the social peace and fullness

toward which all were groping. In the more lowly worlds, moreover, few

were the individuals who won any satisfaction of life even within the

narrow bounds of their own imperfect nature. No doubt one or two, here

and there, in almost every world, found not merely happiness but the joy

that passes all understanding. But to us, crushed now by the suffering

and futility of a thousand races, it seemed that this joy itself, this

ecstasy, whether it was supported by scattered individuals or by whole

worlds, must after all be condemned as false, and that those who had

found it must after all have been drugged by their own private and

untypical well-being of spirit. For surely it had made them insensitive

to the horror around them.

The sustaining motive of our pilgrimage had been the hunger which

formerly drove men on Earth in search of God. Yes, we had one and all

left our native planets in order to discover whether, regarding the

cosmos as a whole, the spirit which we all in our hearts obscurely knew

and haltingly prized, the spirit which on Earth we sometimes call

humane, was Lord of the Universe, or outlaw; almighty, or crucified. And

now it was becoming clear to us that if the cosmos had any lord at all,

he was not that spirit but some other, whose purpose in creating the

endless fountain of worlds was not fatherly toward the beings that he

had made, but alien, inhuman, dark.

Yet while we felt dismay, we felt also increasingly the hunger to see

and to face fearlessly whatever spirit was indeed the spirit of this

cosmos. For as we pursued our pilgrimage, passing again and again from

tragedy to farce, from farce to glory, from glory often to final

tragedy, we felt increasingly the sense that some terrible, some holy,

yet at the same time unimaginably outrageous and lethal, secret lay just

beyond our reach. Again and again we were torn between horror and

fascination, between moral rage against the universe (or the Star Maker)

and unreasonable worship.

This same conflict was to be observed in all those worlds that were of

our own mental stature. Observing these worlds and the phases of their

past growth, and groping as best we might toward the next plane of

spiritual development, we came at last to see plainly the first stages

of any world’s pilgrimage. Even in the most primitive ages of every

normal intelligent world there existed in some minds the impulse to seek

and to praise some universal thing. At first this impulse was confused

with the craving for protection by some mighty power. Inevitably the

beings theorized that the admired thing must be Power, and that worship

was mere propitiation. Thus they came to conceive the almighty tyrant of

the universe, with themselves as his favored children. But in time it

became clear to their prophets that mere Power was not what the

praiseful heart adored. Then theory enthroned Wisdom, or Law, or

Righteousness. And after an age of obedience to some phantom lawgiver,

or to divine legality itself, the beings found that these concepts too

were inadequate to describe the indescribable glory that the heart

confronted in all things, and mutely prized in all things.

But now, in every world that we visited, alternative ways opened out

before the worshippers. Some hoped to come face to face with their

shrouded god solely by inward-searching meditation. By purging

themselves of all lesser, all trivial: desires, by striving to see

everything dispassionately and with universal sympathy, they hoped to

identify themselves with the spirit of the cosmos. Often they traveled

far along the way of self-perfecting and awakening. But because of this

inward absorption most of them became insensitive to the suffering of

their less-awakened fellows and careless of the communal enterprise of

their kind. In not a few worlds this way of the spirit was thronged by

all the most vital minds.

And because the best attention of the race was given wholly to the inner

life, material and social advancement was checked. The sciences of

physical nature and of life never developed. Mechanical power remained

unknown, and medical and biological power also. Consequently these

worlds stagnated, and sooner or later succumbed to accidents, which

might well have been prevented.

There was a second way of devotion, open to creatures of a more

practical temperament. These, in all the worlds, gave delighted

attention to the universe around them, and chiefly they found the

worshipped thing in the persons of their fellow-beings, and in the

communal bond of mutual insight and love between persons. In themselves

and in each other they prized above all things love.

And their prophets told them that the thing which they had always

adored, the universal spirit, the Creator, the Almighty, the All-wise,

was also the All-loving. Let them therefore worship in practical love of

one another, and in service or the Love-God. And so for an age, short or

long, they strove feebly to love and to become members one of another.

They spun theories in defense of the theory of the Love-God. They set up

priesthoods and temples in service of Love. And because they hungered

for immortality they were told that to love was the way to attain

eternal life. And so love, which seeks no reward, was misconceived.

In most worlds these practical minds dominated over the meditators.

Sooner or later practical curiosity and economic need produced the

material sciences. Probing every region with these sciences, the beings

found nowhere, neither in the atom nor in the galaxy, nor for that

matter in the heart of “man” either, any signature of the Love-God. And

what with the fever of mechanization, and the exploitation of slaves by

masters, and the passions of intertribal warfare, and the increasing

neglect or coarsening of all the more awakened activities of the spirit,

the little flame of praise in their hearts sank lower than it had ever

been in any earlier age, so low that they could no longer recognize it.

And the flame of love, long fanned by the forced draught of doctrine,

but now suffocated by the general obtuseness of the beings to one

another, was reduced to an occasional smoldering warmth, which was most

often mistaken for mere lust. With bitter laughter and rage the tortured

beings now dethroned the image of the Love-God in their hearts.

And so without love and without worship the unhappy beings faced the

increasingly formidable problems of their mechanized and hate-racked

world.

This was the crisis which we in our own worlds knew so well. Many a

world up and down the galaxy never surmounted it. But in a few, some

miracle, which we could not yet clearly envisage, raised the average

minds of these worlds to a higher plane of mentality. Of this I shall

speak later. Meanwhile I will say only that in the few worlds where this

happened, we noticed invariably, before the minds of that world passed

beyond our reach, a new feeling about the universe, a feeling which it

was very difficult for us to share. Not till we had learned to conjure

in ourselves something of this feeling could we follow the fortunes of

these worlds.

But, as we advanced on our pilgrimage, our own desires began to change.

We came to wonder whether, in demanding lordship of the universe for the

divinely humane spirit that we prized most in ourselves and in our

fellow-mortals in all the worlds, we were perhaps impious. We came less

and less to require that Love should be enthroned behind the stars; more

and more we desired merely to pass on, opening our hearts to accept

fearlessly whatever of the truth might fall within our comprehension.

There was a moment, late in this early phase of our pilgrimage, when,

thinking and feeling in unison, we said to one another, “If the Star

Maker is Love, we know that this must be right. But if he is not, if he

is some other, some inhuman spirit, this must be right. And if he is

nothing, if the stars and all else are not his creatures but

self-subsistent, and if the adored spirit is but an exquisite creature

of our minds, then this must be right, this and no other possibility.

For we cannot know whether the highest place for love is on the throne

or on the cross. We cannot know what spirit rules, for on the throne

sits darkness. We know, we have seen, that in the waste of stars love is

indeed crucified; and rightly, for its own proving, and for the throne’s

glory. Love and all that is humane we cherish in our hearts. Yet also we

salute the throne and the darkness upon the throne. Whether it be Love

or not Love, our hearts praise it, outsoaring reason.”

But before our hearts could be properly attuned to this new, strange

feeling, we had still far to go in the understanding of worlds of human

rank, though diverse. I must now try to give some idea of several kinds

of worlds very different from our own, but not in essentials more

mature.