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Frasi di Olaf Stapledon
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William Olaf Stapledon è stato uno scrittore e filosofo britannico, che con le sue opere letterarie contribuì grandemente allo sviluppo del genere fantascientifico nel Novecento.

Concetti che oggi sono parte integrante della fantascienza – ingegneria genetica, terraformazione, imperi galattici, menti collettive, sfere di Dyson sono solo alcuni di questi – possono essere fatti risalire in sostanza alle sue due opere Infinito e Il costruttore di stelle, seppure possono esserci stati riferimenti passeggeri ad alcuni di essi nella fantascienza precedente.

Molte delle opere di Stapledon presentano la tensione tra le aspirazioni più nobili degli esseri intelligenti e i loro istinti animaleschi e violenti. In genere la sua narrativa espone gli avvenimenti in modo distaccato ed impersonale, dando una visione d'insieme di grande ampiezza ma dissolvendo il senso dell'individualità. Wikipedia  

✵ 10. Maggio 1886 – 6. Settembre 1950
Olaf Stapledon: 113   frasi 0   Mi piace

Olaf Stapledon: Frasi in inglese

“Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.
Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 1, “The European War and After” (p. 17)

“The finds were of extreme interest to the Second Men, but not in the manner which the Siberian party had intended, not as a store of scientific and philosophic truth, but as a vivid historical document. The view of the universe which the tablets recorded was both too naïve and too artificial; but the insight which they afforded into the mind of the earlier species was invaluable.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter VII: The Rise of the Second Men; Section 3, “The Zenith of the Second Men” (pp. 112-113)

“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.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 161)

“The cosmos which he now created was that which contains the readers and the writer of this book. In its making he used, but with more cunning art, many of the principles which had already served him in earlier creations; and he wove them together to form a more subtle and more capricious unity than ever before.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XV: The Maker and His Works; 2. Mature Creating (pp. 176-177)

“This kind of internal "telepathic" intercourse, which was to serve me in all my wanderings, was at first difficult, ineffective, and painful. But in time I came to be able to live through the experiences of my host with vividness and accuracy, while yet preserving my own individuality, my own critical intelligence, my own desires and fears. Only when the other had come to realize my presence within him could he, by a special act of volition, keep particular thoughts secret from me.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter III: The Other Earth; 1. On the Other Earth (pp. 25-26)

“The one reasonable goal of social life was affirmed to be the creation of a world of awakened, of sensitive, intelligent, and mutually understanding personalities, banded together for the common purpose of exploring the universe and developing the human spirit’s manifold potentialities.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter VII: More Worlds; 1. A Symbiotic Race (p. 81)

“In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 1, “Europe and America” (p. 33)

“I conceived the whole life of the cosmos not as an immensely protracted and leisurely passage from a remote and shadowy source to a glorious and a still more remote eternity, but as a brief, a headlong and forlorn, race against galloping time.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XII: A Stunted Cosmical Spirit (p. 151)

“Though all were devout, and blasphemy was regarded with horror, the general attitude to the deity was one of blasphemous commercialism.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter III: The Other Earth; 3. The Prospects of the Race (p. 39)

“Long before the human spirit awoke to clear cognizance of the world and itself, it sometimes stirred in its sleep, opened bewildered eyes, and slept again.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 1, “The European War and After” (p. 17)

“I had now to select that mode of the primitive which is distinctive of your own species, a mode characterized by repressed sexuality, excessive self-regard, and an intelligence which is both rudimentary and in bondage to unruly cravings.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last Men in London

Last Men in London (1932)

“In their brief primitive phase, the Fifth Men, like so many other races, sought to console themselves by unreasoning faith in a life after death, They conceived, for instance, that at death terrestrial beings embarked upon a career continuous with earthly life, but far more ample, either in some remote planetary system, or in some wholly distinct orb of space-time. But though such theories were never disproved in the primitive era, they gradually began to seem not merely improbable but ignoble.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XII: The Last Terrestrials; Section 1, “The Cult of Evanescence” (p. 176)

“It seemed 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 his achievement, but recognizing at last the irrevocable flaws in his initial conception, and already lusting for fresh creation.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 164)

“[S]ervants of darkness had no lasting joy in their service. In all of them the will for darkness was a perversion of the will for the light. In all but a few maniacs the satisfaction of the will for darkness was at all times countered by a revulsion which the unhappy spirit either dared not confess even to itself, or else rejected as cowardly and evil.”

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Olaf Stapledon

Part V The Reign of Darkness, 2. A Synthetic War
Darkness and the light (1941/42)

“The aim was to provide that in boring occupations hours should be short, and in interesting work long. Exceptionally, some monotonous work involved rather long hours, but in such cases the workers were chosen from the psychological class who thrive best on monotonous occupations in which they can day-dream.”

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Olaf Stapledon

Part VIII Precarious Advance, 3. Progress.
Darkness and the light (1941/42)

“In you, humanity is precarious; and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last Men in London

Origine: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter I: The World of the Last Men.

“Moral judgments may conflict with one another. Two conflicting moral judgments cannot both be right. This does not mean that the moral intuition itself is subject to error, but merely that we may fail to disentangle the intuition itself from irrelevances, or may unconsciously pretend to have an intuition when we actually have it not. The intuition itself is infallible; but we can never be sure that we have it, or that we have not confused it, or expressed it falsely in words. In the same way sense-experience is infallible, but we may unconsciously pretend to have it when we have, it not, and we may misdescribe it, and so on.”

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Olaf Stapledon

Philosophy and Living (1939)

“The great struggle of our age was brewing.
One antagonist appeared as the will to dare for the sake of the new, the longed for, the reasonable and joyful, world, in which every man and woman may have scope to live fully, and live in service of mankind. The other seemed essentially the myopic fear of the unknown; or was it more sinister? Was it the cunning will for private mastery, which fomented for its own ends the archaic, reason-hating, and vindictive, passion of the tribe.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XVI: Epilogue: Back to Earth (p. 187)

“The expansion of the whole cosmos was but the shrinkage of all its physical units and of the wavelengths of light.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 162)

“She said, "We are bound to hurt one another so much, again and again. We are so terribly different." "Yes," he said, "But the more different, the more lovely the loving."”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Sirius

Origine: Sirius (1944), Chapter IV Youth (a conversation between Sirius and Plaxy).

“Still peering eastward from my hill, I saw the Pacific, strewn with islands; and then the Americas, where the descendants of Europe long ago mastered the descendants of Asia, through priority in the use of guns, and the arrogance that guns breed.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XVI: Epilogue: Back to Earth (p. 187)

“As conscious beings advance in mental growth, they come to recognise that this ideal must embrace not merely their own kin or neighbours, not only their tribe or nation, not only the whole race or species, but all conscious beings whatever, no matter how foreign. It is surely probable that this desire for the fulfilment of personality-in-community plays a very large part in the universe. We must remember, of course, that the particular forms which it may take in different kinds of worlds, up and down the universe, may be utterly alien to our comprehension and appreciation. Or rather, not utterly alien; since, if these arguments are correct, there is an essential underlying kinship and identity in all possible kinds of conscious being.”

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Olaf Stapledon

Origine: Philosophy and Living (1939), Chapter VII: Ethics

“The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter I: The Earth; 2. Earth Among the Stars (p. 13)

“Yet though time is cyclic, it is not repetitive; there is no other time within which it can repeat itself.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XV: The Last Men; Section 4, “Cosmology” (p. 229)

“Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded, and all the suns gone dead and cold, there'll still be time. Oh, God, what for?”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Sirius

Sirius (1944)

“No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb [Earth] teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter I: The Earth; 2. Earth Among the Stars (p. 15)

“The governments hated the peace party even more than each other, since their existence now depended on war.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter III: America and China; Section 2, “The Conflict” (p. 50)

“As the months of agony advanced, there was bred in the warring peoples a genuine and even passionate will for peace and a united world. Out of the conflict of the tribes arose, at least for a while, a spirit loftier than tribalism. But this fervour lacked as yet clear guidance, lacked even the courage of conviction.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Last and First Men

Origine: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 1, “The European War and After” (p. 18)

“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.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter VI: Intimations of the Star Maker (p. 71)

“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.”

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Olaf Stapledon libro Star Maker

Origine: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 164)

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