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

It was not only physical effulgence that struck me down in that supreme

moment of my life. In that moment I guessed what mood it was of the

infinite spirit that had in fact made the cosmos, and constantly

supported it, watching its tortured growth. And it was that discovery

which felled me.

For I had been confronted not by welcoming and kindly love, but by a

very different spirit. And at once I knew that the Star Maker had made

me not to be his bride, nor yet his treasured child, but for some other

end.

It seemed to me that he gazed down on me from the height of his divinity

with the aloof though passionate attention of an artist judging his

finished work; calmly rejoicing in its achievement, but recognizing at

last the irrevocable flaws in its initial conception, and already

lusting for fresh creation.

His gaze anatomized me with calm skill, dismissing my imperfections, and

absorbing for his own enrichment all the little excellence that I had

won in the struggle of the ages.

In my agony I cried out against my ruthless maker. I cried out that,

after all, the creature was nobler than the creator; for the creature

loved and craved love, even from the star that was the Star Maker; but

the creator, the Star Maker, neither loved nor had need of love.

But no sooner had I, in my blinded misery, cried out, than I was struck

dumb with shame. For suddenly it was clear to me that virtue in the

creator is not the same as virtue in the creature. For the creator, if

he should love his creature, would be loving only a part of himself; but

the creature, praising the creator, praises an infinity beyond himself.

I saw that the virtue of the creature was to love and to worship, but

the virtue of the creator was to create, and to be the infinite, the

unrealizable and incomprehensible goal of worshipping creatures.

Once more, but in shame and adoration, I cried out to my maker. I said,

“It is enough, and far more than enough, to be the creature of so dread

and lovely a spirit, whose potency is infinite, whose nature passes the

comprehension even of a minded cosmos. It is enough to have been

created, to have embodied for a moment the infinite and tumultuously

creative spirit. It is infinitely more than enough to have been used, to

have been the rough sketch for some perfected creation.”

And so there came upon me a strange peace and a strange joy.

Looking into the future, I saw without sorrow, rather with quiet

interest, my own decline and fall. I saw the populations of the stellar

worlds use up more and more of their resources for the maintenance of

their frugal civilizations. So much of the interior matter of the stars

did they disintegrate, that their worlds were in danger of collapse.

Some worlds did indeed crash in fragments upon their hollow centers,

destroying the indwelling peoples. Most, before the critical point was

reached, were remade, patiently taken to pieces and rebuilt upon a

smaller scale. One by one, each star was turned into a world of merely

planetary size. Some were no bigger than the moon. The populations

themselves were reduced to a mere millionth of their original numbers,

maintaining within each little hollow grain a mere skeleton civilization

in conditions that became increasingly penurious.

Looking into the future aeons from the supreme moment of the cosmos, I

saw the populations still with all their strength maintaining the

essentials of their ancient culture, still living their personal lives

in zest and endless novelty of action, still practicing telepathic

intercourse between worlds, still telepathically sharing all that was of

value in their respective world-spirits, still supporting a truly

cosmical community with its single cosmical mind. I saw myself still

preserving, though with increasing difficulty, my lucid consciousness;

battling against the onset of drowsiness and senility, no longer in the

hope of winning through to any more glorious state than that which I had

already known, or of laying a less inadequate jewel of worship before

the Star Maker, but simply out of sheer hunger for experience, and out

of loyalty to the spirit.

But inevitably decay overtook me. World after world, battling with

increasing economic difficulties, was forced to reduce its population

below the numbers needed for the functioning of its own communal

mentality. Then, like a degenerating brain-center, it could no longer

fulfil its part in the cosmical experience.

Looking forward from my station in the supreme moment of the cosmos, I

saw myself, the cosmical mind, sink steadily toward death. But in this

my last aeon, when all my powers were waning, and the burden of my

decaying body pressed heavily on my enfeebled courage, an obscure memory

of past lucidity still consoled me. For confusedly I knew that even in

this my last, most piteous age I was still under the zestful though

remote gaze of the Star Maker.

Still probing the future, from the moment of my supreme unwithered

maturity, I saw my death, the final breaking of those telepathic

contacts on which my being depended. Thereafter the few surviving worlds

lived on in absolute isolation, and in that barbarian condition which

men call civilized. Then in world after world the basic skills of

material civilization began to fail; and in particular the techniques of

atomic disintegration and photosynthesis. World after world either

accidentally exploded its little remaining store of matter, and was

turned into a spreading, fading sphere of lightwaves in the immense

darkness; or else died miserably of starvation and cold. Presently

nothing was left in the whole cosmos but darkness and the dark whiffs of

dust that once were galaxies. Aeons incalculable passed. Little by

little each whiff of dust-grains contracted upon itself through the

gravitational influence of its parts; till at last, not without fiery

collisions between wandering grains, all the matter in each whiff was

concentrated to become a single lump. The pressure of the huge outer

regions heated the center of each lump to incandescence and even to

explosive activity. But little by little the last resources of the

cosmos were radiated away from the cooling lumps, and nothing was left

but rock and the inconceivably faint ripples of radiation that crept in

all directions throughout the ever “expanding” cosmos, far too slowly to

bridge the increasing gulfs between the islanded grains of rock.

Meanwhile, since each rocky sphere that had once been a galaxy had been

borne beyond every possible physical influence of its fellows, and there

were no minds to maintain telepathic contact between them, each was in

effect a wholly distinct universe. And since all change had ceased, the

proper time of each barren universe had also ceased.

Since this apparently was to be the static and eternal end, I withdrew

my fatigued attention back once more to the supreme moment which was in

fact my present, or rather my immediate past. And with the whole mature

power of my mind I tried to see more clearly what it was that had been

present to me in that immediate past. For in that instant when I had

seen the blazing star that was the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the

very eye of that splendor, strange vistas of being; as though in the

depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet

coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos.