His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem Read Free Book Online

for me to read "profound" works—because in them I quickly reach the place where the author's obvious is no longer mine, and thereafter he speaks only to himself, tells only of himself, appeals only to himself, and loses the right to deliver pronouncements that are valid for me, not to mention the rest of the bipeds that populate the planet.
    I had to laugh, for instance, at the assurance of those who determined that all thought was linguistic. Those philosophers did not know that they were creating a subset of the species, i.e., the group of those not gifted mathematically. How many times in my life, after the revelation of a new discovery, having formulated it so solidly that it was quite indelible, unforgettable, was I obliged to wrestle for hours to find for it some verbal suit of clothes, because the thing had been born, in me, beyond the pale of all language, natural or formal?
    I call this phenomenon "surfacing." It defies description, because what emerges from the unconscious with difficulty, slowly, finds nests of words for itself; it exists as an entity before it settles inside those nests; yet I can give no indication, no hint, to explain in precisely what form that non- and preverbalness appears; it is heralded only by a keen presentiment that the expectation of it will not be in vain. The philosopher who does not know such states from introspection is, with respect to the quality of certain mechanisms in the brain, a man unlike me; we may belong to the same species, but we differ far more than such thinkers could wish.
    It was precisely with regard to the vulnerability and the huge risk that the philosopher takes upon himself that the situation of the people of the Project was similar, in the face of its central problem. What did we have to work with? A mystery and a jungle of guesses. From the mystery we chipped off a few slivers of fact, but when they did not increase, or amount to any solid edifice that could correct our hypotheses, the hypotheses began gradually to assume the upper hand, and in the end we wandered lost in a wilderness of conjectures, of conjectures based upon conjectures. Our constructs became more and more inspired and bold, more and more removed from the store of accumulated knowledge—we were prepared to raze that store, to lay in ruins the most sacred principles of physics or astronomy, if only we could possess the mystery. So it seemed to us.
    The reader who has plowed his way to this point and is waiting, with growing impatience, to be led into the inner sanctum of the famous enigma, in the hope that I will regale him with thrills and chills every bit as delightful as those he experiences viewing horror movies, I advise to set my book down now, because he will be disappointed. I am writing no sensational story, but telling how our civilization was subjected to a test of cosmic—or at least of more-than-terrestrial—universality, and what came of this. From the beginning of my work in the Project, I believed that the Project was just such a test, quite apart from the question of what benefits were anticipated from my activity and that of my friends.
    He who has been following me closely may have noticed that in shifting the problem of "carrousellike reasoning" from the relationship between myself and my theme, to the theme itself (i.e., to the relationship between the scientists and His Master's Voice), I extricated myself from an embarrassing position, widening the accusation of "undisclosed sources of inspiration" until it covered the entire Project. But that had been my intention even before I heard such criticism. With an exaggeration that is necessary for the clarification of my meaning, I will say that in the course of my work (it is difficult to say exactly when this occurred) I began to suspect that the "letter from the stars" was, for us who attempted to decipher it, a kind of psychological association test, a particularly complex Rorschach test. For as a subject, believing