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

all ages had been obscurely striving. Strange it was that these

latter-day populations, cramped and impoverished, counting their past

pence of energy, should achieve the task that had defeated the brilliant

hosts of earlier epochs. Theirs was indeed the case of the wren that

outsoared the eagle. In spite of their straitened circumstances they

were still able to maintain the essential structure of a cosmical

community, and a cosmical mentality. And with native insight they could

use the past to deepen their wisdom far beyond the range of any past

wisdom. The supreme moment of the cosmos was not (or will not be) a

moment by human standards; but by cosmical standards it was indeed a

brief instant. When little more than half the total population of many

million galaxies had entered fully into the cosmical community, and it

was clear that no more were to be expected, there followed a period of

universal meditation. The populations maintained their straitened

Utopian civilizations, lived their personal lives of work and social

intercourse, and at the same time, upon the communal plane, refashioned

the whole structure of cosmical culture. Of this phase I shall say

nothing. Suffice it that to each galaxy and to each world was assigned a

special creative mental function, and that all assimilated the work of

all. At the close of this period I, the communal mind, emerged re-made,

as from a chrysalis; and for a brief moment, which was indeed the

supreme moment of the cosmos, I faced the Star Maker.

For the human author of this book there is now nothing left of that

age-long, that eternal moment which I experienced as the cosmical mind,

save the recollection of a bitter beatitude, together with a few

incoherent memories of the experience itself which fired me with that

beatitude.

Somehow I must tell something of that experience. Inevitably I face the

task with a sense of abysmal incompetence. The greatest minds of the

human race through all the ages of human history have failed to describe

their moments of deepest insight. Then how dare I attempt this task? And

yet I must. Even at the risk of well-merited ridicule and contempt and

moral censure, I must stammer out what I have seen. If a shipwrecked

seaman on his raft is swept helplessly past marvelous coasts and then

home again, he cannot hold his peace. The cultivated may turn away in

disgust at his rude accent and clumsy diction. The knowing may laugh at

his failure to distinguish between fact and illusion. But speak he must.

3. THE SUPREME MOMENT AND AFTER

In the supreme moment of the cosmos I, as the cosmical mind, seemed to

myself to be confronted with the source and the goal of all finite

things.

I did not, of course, in that moment sensuously perceive the infinite

spirit, the Star Maker. Sensuously I perceived nothing but what I had

perceived before, the populous interiors of many dying stellar worlds.

But through the medium which in this book is called telepathic I was now

given a more inward perception. I felt the immediate presence of the

Star Maker. Latterly, as I have said, I had already been powerfully

seized by a sense of the veiled presence of some being other than

myself, other than my cosmical body and conscious mind, other than my

living members and the swarms of the burnt-out stars. But now the veil

trembled and grew half-transparent to the mental vision. The source and

goal of all, the Star Maker, was obscurely revealed to me as a being

indeed other than my conscious self, objective to my vision, yet as in

the depth of my own nature; as, indeed, myself, though infinitely more

than myself.

It seemed to me that I now saw the Star Maker in two aspects: as the

spirit’s particular creative mode that had given rise to me, the cosmos;

and also, most dreadfully, as something incomparably greater than

creativity, namely as the eternally achieved perfection of the absolute

spirit.

Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the

experience.

Confronted with this infinity that lay deeper than my deepest roots and

higher than my topmost reach, I, the cosmical mind, the flower of all

the stars and worlds, was appalled, as any savage is appalled by the

lightning and the thunder. And as I fell abject before the Star Maker,

my mind was flooded with a spate of images. The fictitious deities of

all races in all worlds once more crowded themselves upon me, symbols of

majesty and tenderness, of ruthless power, of blind creativity, and of

all-seeing wisdom. And though these images were but the fantasies of

created minds, it seemed to me that one and all did indeed embody some

true feature of the Star Maker’s impact upon the creatures.

As I contemplated the host of deities that rose to me like a smoke cloud

from the many worlds, a new image, a new symbol of the infinite spirit,

took shape in my mind. Though born of my own cosmical imagination, it

was begotten by a greater than I. To the human writer of this book

little remains of that vision which so abashed and exalted me as the

cosmical mind. But I must strive to recapture it in a feeble net of

words as best I may.

It seemed to me that I had reached back through time to the moment of

creation. I watched the birth of the cosmos.

The spirit brooded. Though infinite and eternal, it had limited itself

with finite and temporal being, and it brooded on a past that pleased it

not. It was dissatisfied with some past creation, hidden from me; and it

was dissatisfied also with its own passing nature. Discontent goaded the

spirit into fresh creation.

But now, according to the fantasy that my cosmical mind conceived, the

absolute spirit, self-limited for creativity, objectified from itself an

atom of its infinite potentiality. This microcosm was pregnant with the

germ of a proper time and space, and all the kinds of cosmical beings.

Within this punctual cosmos the myriad but not unnumbered physical

centers of power, which men conceive vaguely as electrons, protons, and

the rest, were at first coincident with one another. And they were

dormant. The matter of ten million galaxies lay dormant in a point.

Then the Star Maker said, “Let there be light.” And there was light.

From all the coincident and punctual centers of power, light leapt and

blazed. The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and

time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were

hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a

longing, the single spirit of the whole; and each mirrored in itself

aspects of all others throughout all the cosmical space and time.

No longer punctual, the cosmos was now a volume of inconceivably dense

matter and inconceivably violent radiation, constantly expanding. And it

was a sleeping and infinitely dissociated spirit.

But to say that the cosmos was expanding is equally to say that its

members were contracting. The ultimate centers of power, each at first

coincident with the punctual cosmos, themselves generated the cosmical

space by their disengagement from each other. The expansion of the whole

cosmos was but the shrinkage of all its physical units and of the

wave-lengths of its light. Though the cosmos was ever of finite bulk, in

relation to its minutiae of lightwaves, it was boundless and

center-less. As the surface of a swelling sphere lacks boundary and

center, so the swelling volume of the cosmos was boundless and

center-less. But as the spherical surface is centered on a point foreign

to it, in a “third dimension,” so the volume of the cosmos was centered

in a point foreign to it, in a “fourth dimension.”

The congested and exploding cloud of fire swelled till it was of a

planet’s size, a star’s size, the size of a whole galaxy, and of ten

million galaxies. And in swelling it became more tenuous, less

brilliant, less turbulent. Presently the cosmical cloud was disrupted by

the stress of its expansion in conflict with the mutual clinging of its

parts, disrupted into many million cloudlets, the swarm of the great

nebulae.

For a while these were as close to one another in relation to their bulk

as the flocculations of a mottled sky. But the channels between them

widened, till they were separated as flowers on a bush, as bees in a

flying swarm, as birds migrating, as ships on the sea. More and more

rapidly they retreated from one another; and at the same time each cloud

contracted, becoming first a ball of down and then a spinning lens and

then a featured whirl of star-streams.

Still the cosmos expanded, till the galaxies that were most remote from

one another were flying apart so swiftly that the creeping light of the

cosmos could no longer bridge the gulf between them.

But I, with imaginative vision, retained sight of them all. It was as

though some other, some hypercosmical and instantaneous light, issuing

from nowhere in the cosmical space, illuminated all things inwardly.

Once more, but in a new and cold and penetrating light, I watched all

the lives of stars and worlds, and of the galactic communities, and of

myself, up to the moment wherein now I stood, confronted by the infinity

that men call God, and conceive according to their human cravings.

I, too, now sought to capture the infinite spirit, the Star Maker, in an

image spun by my own finite though cosmical nature. For now it seemed to

me, it seemed, that I suddenly outgrew the three-dimensional vision

proper to all creatures, and that I saw with physical sight the Star

Maker. I saw, though nowhere in cosmical space, the blazing source of

the hypercosmical light, as though it were an overwhelmingly brilliant

point, a star, a sun more powerful than all suns together. It seemed to

me that this effulgent star was the center of a four-dimensional sphere

whose curved surface was the three-dimensional cosmos. This star of

stars, this star that was indeed the Star Maker, was perceived by me,

its cosmical creature, for one moment before its splendor seared my

vision. And in that moment I knew that I had indeed seen the very source

of all cosmical light and life and mind; and of how much else besides I

had as yet no knowledge.

But this image, this symbol that my cosmical mind had conceived under

the stress of inconceivable experience, broke and was transformed in the

very act of my conceiving it, so inadequate was it to the actuality of

the experience. Harking back in my blindness to the moment of my vision,

I now conceived that the star which was the Star Maker, and the immanent

center of all existence, had been perceived as looking down on me, his

creature, from the height of his infinitude; and that when I saw him I

immediately spread the poor wings of my spirit to soar up to him, only

to be blinded and seared and struck down. It had seemed to me in the

moment of my vision that all the longing and hope of all finite spirits

for union with the infinite spirit were strength to my wings. It seemed

to me that the Star, my Maker, must surely stoop to meet me and raise me

and enfold me in his radiance. For it seemed to me that I, the spirit of

so many worlds, the flower of so many ages, was the Church Cosmical, fit

at last to be the bride of God. But instead I was blinded and seared and

struck